


Impact

by extremesoft



Category: Formula 1 RPF, Motorsport RPF
Genre: Anger, Angst and Feels, Arguing, Dreams and Nightmares, Feelings Realization, Fights, First Kiss, Firsts, Hand Jobs, Insecurity, Introspection, Kissing, Language, M/M, Ouch, Reconciliation, The End, bear with me, but in quite unfortunate circumstances, i can't believe i wrote this entire thing, i don't know if this counts as slow burn but this sure is excruciating, i'm terribly sorry, kind of, light petting if you will, resolving feelings, so much feelings, something good may actually come out of all this though, you think they fought in the first chapter?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-07-15 02:08:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16053221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extremesoft/pseuds/extremesoft
Summary: He has hoped for nothing else than that Daniel would decide to stay. That the team would get to keep Daniel in the end. Thathewould get to keep Daniel in the end.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh. Took some stuff like ~~utter clusterfuck season~~ silly season feels still left sort of unaddressed and then some things I wanted to try out, like torturing myself by making these two idiots act the way they act in the following. Mixed them together, and the result was, uh, the following mayhem of words. This all is seriously going to get better and happier but let's hit rock bottom first, right? :')
> 
> I'm not sure if I can even say that I hope you enjoy this first chapter like I usually do, since I'm not sure if this is in any way enjoyable as much as it is unpleasant and downright nasty at times, but I hope you, err, bear it? :'D Let me know if you did. Archive warnings for pathos and an overwhelming amount of angst and feels apply for the time being.

The Belgian Grand Prix edges closer with unnecessary haste, and along with it the end of the summer break - and maybe the end of all summers, maybe the end of the world like he knows it as well, feels like it anyway and the mere thought of seeing Daniel again wrenches Max’s gut more than he can tolerate. In the early dawn of that day he finds himself bent over the toilet seat again, retching uncontrollably, trying to empty his wreck of a heart as well as his already hollow innards.

Of course he tries to reason with himself. He fails as often as he tries, but he is hellbent, and he goes through the motions in his head yet again while brushing his teeth for the second time that morning to lose the stale taste of bile looming in his throat. This is nothing but ridiculous, acting like he’s acting and feeling like he’s feeling. What he will most likely face is the same Daniel as always, sure, nothing more. The same smile as always, the same twinkling eyes as always, the same silly jokes as always, his whole being pure summertime glow and scorch, as always.

But Max can’t stop himself from thinking about how, in the end, it is still going to be a completely different Daniel. What he will face this time is the version of Daniel that is _leaving_.

Max has actively and rigorously tried to avoid stumbling on the subject in his thoughts, for the whole year already. Ever since the beginning of the season, as the maelstrom of endless rumours and speculation has kept raging around Daniel and picking up speed, he has hoped for nothing else than that Daniel would decide to stay. That the team would get to keep Daniel in the end. That _he_ would get to keep Daniel in the end.

It is nothing but wrong. Max knows there is nothing that’s within the limits of acceptable in what he's thinking and how he's feeling, and his wishes never pass his lips as anything more than a casual comment in one of the countless press conferences, when he says _I hope that we’ll be teammates for a long time_. And there still are moments every now and then when he almost, _almost_ thinks he’s gotten the upper hand of it, of what Daniel is to him. There are moments every now and then when he almost, _almost_ looks at Daniel and _doesn’t_ imagine what it would be like, what he would be like. How Daniel’s lips would feel like when pressed against his own. How warm Daniel’s skin, caressed by the sun, would feel under the touch of his hand, and how he would respond when caressed by Max in his turn. But more often than anything there are the moments when he comes crashing down along with his feebly founded tower of self-control as he sees Daniel and instantly gets caught in the way he thinks of Daniel as so much _more_ in every way.

 _Maybe it’s for the best that he goes_ , Max tells himself at times during those painstaking days of trying to digest Daniel’s announcement and interminably failing. Perhaps getting deprived of Daniel’s constant presence would make him finally stop longing for it more than surely is healthy for him. Out of sight, out of mind, right? Grit your teeth like the man you are and wait it out, what an excellent plan, yeah, it will get easier as time goes by and time will heal all wounds, right?

And for a moment he almost, _almost_ believes all the bullshit he manically keeps reciting; and then he catches a glimpse of Daniel’s summer-kissed face yet again somewhere, it all falls to pieces and he is left with disgust and shame, being so pathetic and failing to lie even to himself.

Meeting one’s own teammate on a race weekend bears the same inevitability as do things like sunrise and sunset; but Max still hopes that he would have managed to be the first to initiate it this time, he gets completely caught off guard by Daniel knocking on his door and sort of just nonchalantly letting himself in after Max having barely said half a word. Being the first to go would have given Max the chance to try and mend himself the best he could, mask himself with unmovedness, rehearse his lines once more before heading to the stage to play the part of a surprised but understanding teammate and friend, and nothing more than those. He feels like he is not ready for the fight ahead, his skin is not as thick and his armour not as heavy as he would like them to be, and it saddens him how he momentarily feels like a cold gust of wind had cut him in half when Daniel simply starts “how was your holiday?”

 _I thought about you all the time_ , answers Max with his heart.

“It was very nice”, answers Max with his voice. “Always good to relax a bit. Especially after the triple-header, that was crazy... So, how about yours?" he asks in return and dreads already.  
"Must have been interesting, right?”  
“Well, phew”, begins Daniel and flashes a stunned, bright grin. He doesn't really need to say anything to make it perfectly clear what’s uppermost in his mind and strike a direct hit through Max's fraying defences. “I guess mine was, uh, mind-blowing to say the least.”  
“Yeah, I saw the news”, says Max and cracks half a smile, wondering how a sentence that short can sound so unbelievably awkward and idiotic as he voices it. Of course he has seen the fucking news, heard the fucking news, thought of pretty much nothing else for the whole of his summer break than the fucking _news_. What has probably made it easier for Daniel to properly wind down during holidays, coming out with the _news_ , has made Max all the more riled up; and as he tries to keep up normal, ordinary eye contact with Daniel he is quite sure he has never done anything more demanding in his entire time on earth. The whole encounter suddenly feels more life-threatening than what he does for a living, calculating whether he’s able to take the next corner in a higher gear than usual and ever gambling with the endless chances to meet his supposed maker.

“Congratulations, mate”, he continues nevertheless, each and every word of his struggling to get past the noose he feels tightening around his neck. “I hope good things will come out of it.”  
“Thanks, mate”, smiles Daniel and nods, an effortless, carefree movement - and fuck how Max hates it, that warm cadence of his speech and of his sheer existence, Daniel should just punch him in the face and tell him to piss off for whatever nonexistent reason, everything would be easier if he did. “Appreciated. I kinda hope so too.”  
Max bites back a smirk and crafts it into one more compliant, bland smile instead. “Well, naturally.”

_Say something, shit, anything._

And as Max keeps looking at Daniel he instinctively senses the change in the air surrounding him. It is a different Daniel to the one he parted from when they left for their holidays. He is calmer and determined now, as if in some kind of still fragile but all the more awaited peace with himself; and if anything, it makes Max feel even more indisposed. He can’t help thinking that he has got absolutely no right to be so completely destroyed by just the thought of what is going to happen to them after the season has slipped through his fingers and come to its end.

“You must be surprised, I reckon”, continues Daniel, slowly and unknowingly making Max’s armour creak, plate after plate, “and I don’t blame you, I guess I kinda took myself by surprise as well.”  
“Yeah, I… was a bit surprised, to be honest”, says Max and makes sure to not let the feeling of being strangled to death sound through in any word.  
“No wonder, yeah, I get that. But I just think that making some changes will do me good in the end”, Daniel says and keeps nodding and bobbing his head like there was something _right_ in this situation, oh fuck, why can’t Daniel shut up and quit talking for once in his life, Max can barely stand to listen to that voice of his. He feels himself filling with an almost panicked kind of longing already, his head whirrs and everything in the world except for him and Daniel stops still; and Daniel’s next words are as unavoidable as are things like sunrise and sunset and meeting your own teammate on a race weekend. _Why_ does he have to look Max in the eye when he says it, Max wishes he could look away but it’s too late, they are too far gone for that.  
“And, uh, just to make sure you know this… It’s not about you. You haven’t done anything wrong, or anything like that, in case you wondered.”

It is a different Daniel now. It is the version of Daniel that is leaving. The same yet strange and unfamiliar. Max tries to fight back the stream of thoughts crashing against the floodgates he has built in his own brain; but the barricades of his making are already on the verge of giving in and images ooze through the rapidly widening fissures, unbidden and overpowering. Max doesn’t know whether the burn in his eyes is worse than the one in his throat but he can’t stop himself, not anymore. He has lost Daniel already, Daniel is light years away even now, when he is standing so unbearably close, what is there left to do or say that could make any of it any worse.

He takes the single step separating them and makes Daniel startle and shift with the sudden movement breaking through the weighty silence. And as he grabs Daniel by the front of his shirt, his fingertips scraping the toned flesh underneath it through the fabric, he swears he sees a flash of alarm in the ebony of Daniel’s eyes, as if the image of Max actually attacking him, or strangling him with the collar of his own shirt, had made its way to his brain;

and then Max crashes his mouth on Daniel’s, so hard his dry bottom lip clashes with Daniel’s teeth with a flash of hurt and the dull taste of blood swiftly blooming on his tongue. He can't make out which one pains him more in the end, the minuscule cut in his lip or the ache that knots his stomach as they collide and he hears and _feels_ the sound Daniel makes, complete shock and bewilderment mixed together. The distance is still light years, and it all isn’t really as much a kiss as it is an impact.

Max staggers back and wipes his mouth with the back of his shaking hand, both defiant and mortified. His lips feel sore and throbbing and he sees how Daniel’s mouth gapes, reddened, no sound coming out. He’s not sure whether to feel somehow accomplished about seemingly having caused a chink in Daniel’s impenetrable armour of light or to break down with infinite shame because of how weak he is, how he let himself crack and collapse, how he let himself show _Daniel_ how frail he is.

“No”, breathes Daniel, choked and having lost all other words, eyes full of black instead of gold now. “Max, no.”

And all Max can think of is how Daniel is so lost to him already, it is the end of all summers and the end of all. Max is sinking into the bottom of the abyss that is he himself, there is no-one to drag him to the surface; and so there is no other option for him in his sights but to fill his weakened lungs with cold water and let go.  
“You’re right”, he hisses, gritting his teeth together like it would somehow keep the prickling tears from pooling in the corners of his eyes if he did it with enough effort. “I had absolutely no right to do that. Sorry. You should go.”  
“Yeah, you didn’t - and is this how you actually think you can deal with me?” asks Daniel after quickly brushing the corner of his mouth with his knuckles, words rumbling with thunder. “Have a fucking meltdown on me and then just try to get rid of me?”  
“You’re getting rid of me already”, argues Max, he sounds so pathetic and immature, he is pathetic and immature. “I don’t think it matters what I do anymore.”  
“You don’t understand anything”, says Daniel in disbelief.

“No, I do”, Max insists, itching with irritation as well as frustration and sorrow. Ready, aim, fire. “I do understand. You need to go. I get it. I’m happy for you.”  
“You sure don’t look it”, Daniel spits, sounds sour and off.  
“You think?” blurts Max, choking on his own bitterness, wanting Daniel gone while hopelessly inconsolable about him leaving and none of it makes sense, hasn’t made in a long time. Ready, aim, fire. “Sorry if I disappoint you, I can try to look happier if you want that.”  
“Fuck, Max, seriously”, huffs Daniel and keeps tangling his fingers restlessly through the black mess of his curls. “I think I’d better go, I can’t do this now and not like this.”  
“Oh, so where are you off to?” snaps Max in his turn, unable to stop the acid from pouring out of his mouth and now unwilling to even try. Ready, aim, fire. “You’re in a hurry? To your next negotiations, perhaps? Trying to see if they still could pay you five times more?”

He is so spellbound by his own overflowing hurt and anger that he completely fails to register how Daniel’s features darken with distress, and he can barely outline the contents of his own mind over the gunfire-like ringing of his own pulse in his ears.  
“ _Mate_ ”, utters Daniel. It's almost like a wistful sigh, and to Max it feels unbelievably worse than a blow to the gut would have ever felt. “You seriously need to get a hold of yourself.”  
“I agree”, retorts Max in a foolish attempt to appear dauntless, counting seconds and the beats of his heart, dying to look away from Daniel but for some reason still not able to do so. “I need to do exactly that. As you saw. Sorry”, fuck how he almost involuntarily keeps saying _sorry_ like he somehow _was_. “Don’t worry, it will be easier when you’re not around me all the time anymore.”  
“No, Max. I didn’t necessarily mean _that_ ”, says Daniel all of a sudden, softer and worn. It sticks a covert needle through Max’s shield of rage and Daniel doesn't grant him time to strike back anymore before he opens his mouth again.  
“Are you... is it what I think it is?”

All halts again, everything.

“I- yes”, answers Max after a silence and the words and his weapons are suddenly reduced to nothing more than a quivering confession. Daniel knows, oh God, it’s out in the open now and can’t be made undisclosed anymore. Max has let it all loose, what he thinks and how he feels about Daniel; and _fuck_ , if only it had seemed more like Daniel had _loathed_ him for that without question, it would have been so much simpler than standing on the edge of this unwilled, sudden rift of _what if_ gaping before him. "If I'm being honest. I’m sorry. I can’t... help it.”  
“And this is how you actually think you can deal with it. With me”, echoes Daniel his own words. They taste different on his tongue now, as weary and dejected as he is himself. “Have a fucking meltdown on me and then try to get rid of me.”  
Every nerve and fibre of Max's being now aches with shame and battle wounds as he glances at Daniel and nods.  
“Easier”, he mutters, not getting the other words of the actual sentence he meant to say out of his throat, past the noose tightly embracing his neck.

And he swears his skin burns to ash in places where Daniel's eyes meet it.  
“You think I haven’t thought about it myself at all?” Daniel whispers, and Max’s insides reel and capsize again when it dawns to him what Daniel means.  
“You think I haven’t wondered what’s really going on with you? And with us? Why we are the way we are all the time?”

Suddenly and finally Max regrets every single word he has said in the past minutes and hours, in the past days and weeks and in all of his life. He would be happy to pour a tankful of petrol over himself and light a match if he knew it would somehow veil and unshatter the things that now are bare and broken.

“But I can’t- we can’t”, continues Daniel, the words falling from his mouth forcefully piercing holes in the air like falling stones pierce holes in still waters. Not finishing sentences and not calling things with their given names makes everything abstract enough to take. “Not like this, Max. You’re just- messing me up right now.”

“Why didn’t you tell-” starts Max and pauses, not being sure what he wants the most at the moment, cry or throw up or die or try and kiss Daniel again, proper, not like a full-blown assault but like a zephyr, tender and healing; and his body aches when he realizes that every single one of the first three alternatives seem to be more within his reach now than the last one.  
“Why didn’t you?” cuts Daniel in. “I guess my reasons must be pretty much the same as yours.”  
Max knows Daniel is speaking nothing but the truth yet again and is powerless to think about anything else but how irreversibly he might have fucked up everything there was left to fuck up and more.

“I have to go”, sighs Daniel and runs his hand over his face, somehow robbed of his strength, looking like a light inside him had been turned off with his pitch black gaze. Max is silent.  
“Guess I’ll be seeing you, though.”  
“Yeah”, says Max, robbed of everything, even the oddly comforting certainty about Daniel hating his guts since it almost seems like Daniel might not do so as much as Max thought he would. “I think it’s inevitable.”

“You’re not the only one who’s having a pretty hard time with all this, y’ know”, says Daniel before closing the door behind him and leaving Max with an immeasurable amount of nothing at all.

  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right! I think I promised some fine fellows out there that this all would get better and happier, and I'm proud to announce that it would now seem that... that, uh, this shitstorm of a chapter utterly fails to deliver :S Crap

Max spends the following night dreaming ghosts of dreams and feeling ghosts of feelings, and they are all about Daniel, from the first one to the last. And no matter how it may end, Max knows that they will have to face the things they left scattered around them and talk them through as soon as they reasonably can. They can’t leave the weight of it all crushing their shoulders and breaking their backs, slithering on the edges of their minds and constantly eating their focus away. It’s all too dangerous, literally as well as figuratively.

They are stuck in an almost unbearable position in the beginning of the weekend. Practices and meetings gorge their time and their means of sorting anything out grow thin to the point of nonexistent; and they slink around each other in the garage, having to force themselves to somehow give the impression that they are the same Max and same Daniel that left for their summer breaks a few weeks earlier when in reality there is something irreversibly different about them and between them now, the result of what Max thinks of as a fateful moment’s weakness. It’s like a cracked and brittle glass pane had been put in place to part them; they can see each other from their own separate sides of it, from their distances in the garage, but unclear and distorted.

It is only on Saturday night when the opportunity finally presents itself and Max gets his chance to go to Daniel. He feels sick again, he walks with the air of someone who has been given a death sentence and is now headed to the execution site, marching towards an inevitable fate with the point of no return being passed eternities ago. But it has to be done before the race, they can’t drive when they’re like this - they qualified somehow, decent enough but it's still not enough at all, and Max can’t remember the last time he has been so certain that he's going to smash into the barriers because of sheer lack of concentration. He is not used to that, always sticking to his unimpressed attitude and keeping a level head being the guidelines he has always been taught to embrace.

Max doesn’t even dare to try Daniel’s door all by himself to see whether it’s unlocked like Daniel did to his earlier; and the realization is a blow to his core, the twisted symbolism in the moment he slowly raises his hand and gives the door a cautious knock all too agonizing.  
“Daniel?” he asks, struggling to keep the single word he says from wavering.

Silence. Another. Max hears nothing but the booming of his own heartbeat. Then he hears the words _why not_ through the door, said in Daniel’s voice but it’s almost as if they were not really said by Daniel at all; and Max could have never thought it possible how Daniel’s voice would one day send wintry shivers shooting down his spine instead of entwining him in warmth. An inevitable peak of despair and uncertainty momentarily overrides all of his intents - maybe he should just fuck off and leave Daniel be after all, there is no way of fixing the damage and no way Daniel is ever going to forgive him-

no, fuck, this has to be done, _go_. 

He doesn’t hear footsteps and takes it from that and Daniel’s words that the door is open. He tries the handle, it succumbs and turns with a small creak and a click. And then he is in, feeling like he is floating outside of his body as he somehow _observes_ himself taking the steps and slowly closing and locking the door behind him rather than actively does any of it.

He can’t blame Daniel for being angry, as an angry Daniel is what he encounters, even though the way Daniel left the last time did light dim sparks of unnecessarily high hopes in him. But there is still something that’s off in the way Daniel absolutely _seethes_ now, exuding something like pure, blindingly bright _wrath_ instead of mere anger from the armchair that has absorbed him. It is a different Daniel again, the version of Daniel that is leaving and the version of Daniel that is filled not only with endless disappointment but grim animosity as well, and it makes Max freeze to the bone and to the marrow.  
“I think we need to talk about what happened”, he says nevertheless, trying to get to Daniel through the glass and the ice. It sounds like something they only say in movies and soap operas, so overused a line it’s left almost without meaning, but it is the inescapable truth. “We can’t race like this.”  
“Yep. Tell me about it”, answers Daniel, static and reluctant. “You fucked my driving and my whole race weekend up pretty bad with that little stunt of yours, y’ know.”

Max clenches his hands into fists almost unknowingly, focuses on the soothingly concrete feeling of his own blunt nails trying to sink into the skin of his palms. Daniel is testing him, of course, seeing whether he could shred Max apart again with the powers of his voice and his fury only; but Max’s armour is patched up and his wounds are rendered to scar tissue of a tried will, and he is determined not to cave anymore. Fuck, honestly, since when have they had to carry such solid shields of anger and sharp spears of words around each other-

no, Max knows both the answers to that, and he wishes that he didn’t.

“I’m sorry”, he starts, the limits of his calmness already stretching and the feeble-sounding words the best he can muster. “I was upset and I… shouldn’t have done it.”  
Daniel sinks ten-inch needles inside him with his gaze, there lies a shade in those eyes that Max doesn’t recognize as anything of Daniel at all, hostility, being pushed over lines there is no way of drawing again. And it’s Daniel not saying a word that causes such a lapse in Max’s nerve that he pushes it, tries to actually get a reaction out of him.  
“What do you want us to do now?”  
Daniel’s eyes flash and his face sharpens to something inexplicably dangerous. Max feels like he is staring at a wildfire, the flames of it edge closer and closer to him and yet he is too tantalized by them to turn tail and run.  
“You tell me”, Daniel says with a weighty voice and shrugs, the indifference in the gesture completely contrasting the way he is blaze and black smoke. “You started this shithouse.”

Max has to bite back the retort _no, it was actually you_ so forcefully he almost chokes on it, he has to dig his heels deep into the burnt soil of his brain to try and stop Daniel from hurling him over the precipice of his strained composure. _Don’t let him get to you, don’t._  
“If you want to”, oh, how Max hates the way all his words come out so needy and desperate now, how he sounds like he would kneel before Daniel if that was his wish, put a grip on his own neck and break it if that was asked of him, as if everything there was left to do now was to simply give Daniel what he wanted, “we can forget about it. We’ll drive the rest of the season like we always have, you leave in the end of the year and we’ll never speak of it again.”

It’s the solution that solves absolutely nothing at all, the response that leaves open more questions than it answers; there’s not one bit of closure in what he is suggesting but he can’t help offering Daniel the easy way out nevertheless, again. And he watches in a helpless state of hypnosis how Daniel moves his arms, places his hands on the armrests of the chair he has buried himself in like an unwilling emperor trying to hide from the sights of his subjects in the depths of his throne, and rises, not inching his eyes from Max’s. Max can’t stop himself from swallowing hard, his mouth is dry like sun-scorched sand; if he didn’t know better he would say that he is actually _afraid_. Afraid of Daniel and of them both, afraid that another collision of the two forces against each other, another impact, might break the pair of them beyond repair.  
“Oh, but that’s exactly what we _can’t_ do”, jeers Daniel, the cadence in his voice foreign to Max and not far from sheer horror. “It wouldn’t go like that and you _fucking_ know it. We couldn’t drive like that, and it would always be there, and it would do nothing but eat us alive. You’re just trying to get rid of me again, _Maxy_.”

Max feels his body bruising with every word of Daniel’s that crashes over him but he still rivets himself in place in stubborn wait for Daniel’s move. And the already cracked and brittle glass between them resonates more and more violently under the strain of the unbearable silence as Daniel slowly walks up to him; and it shatters completely and the shards fall to the floor as Daniel grabs him by the front of his shirt like he did to Daniel, furling his fingers around fistfuls of the smooth, dark fabric. He pulls Max forward so quickly his balance breaks for a moment when his knees yield, and he pulls Max so close their waists meet and their faces are separated by not much more than their uneven breaths.  
“This is how you’d like all of this to be dealt with, isn’t it?” he growls, and Max can feel his every word and every breath resonating in him now. “I get to have a meltdown on you next and then we’re even, aren’t we? And then we simply lose each other and never talk about it again, right?”

The glass is gone but the distortion remains, and Max starts to inevitably creak and bend under the burden of how completely impossible they are.  
“No, that’s not how I want it to go”, he answers, trying to stay quiet despite Daniel's overpowering grip on him, stills the air in the room as he speaks, doesn’t make a move to try and kiss Daniel like he would want to. “Give me a chance here, Daniel.”  
“You didn’t give me a fucking chance”, spits Daniel as he lets go of Max’s shirt. He places his palms on Max’s chest and gives him a powerless shove before stepping back and threading his fingers in his own curls, restlessly combing through them and then ruffling them again. “Shit, this is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been trying so goddamn hard to avoid, and then you just go and hit me straight on my fucking _face_ with it.”

And suddenly Daniel sounds like he is on the verge of coming undone. All the pent up ire and fear cram themselves in his throat in search of a way out, some way, any way, and it strips Max of his armour and all of his weapons once more. He can do nothing but watch as Daniel’s hands run through his hair again, and again and again, and the wildfire starts to feel lesser and lesser, weaker and dimmer. Daniel’s eyes dart from Max to the wall to the floor to Max to his own arm to Max again.

“I- shit, Max. I’ve been- we’ve been in this fucking mess for so long already”, he starts, hoarse, bleak. “Because that’s what we two are when put together, a fucking mess, right, y’ know? We’re too close to each other, too close, all the fucking time, and there just- doesn’t seem to be a way for me to get past you.”

He fixes his gaze on Max’s and says “and now it’s always about you, all the fucking time”.

Max’s heart grows too heavy to carry and sinks through him, to the floor and beyond, when he understands what Daniel means. And Daniel just keeps tangling and de-tangling his hair, like he is tangling and de-tangling himself. His eyes shine with embers and sorrow and _now_ Max feels like he is truly and unbearably _lost_.  
“And fuck, I thought that if I didn’t do anything about this shit, just hung in there for a few more months”, Daniel continues, not really waiting for Max to answer him in any way, “then we wouldn’t be around each other so much anymore, and this- this stuff would eventually just… cease to exist. I wanted us to part ways with what we had, y’ know. It felt like good enough.”

He glances down at the floor and says “I didn’t want to end up hating you”, and it could kill Max.  
“So now you do?” Max manages to question somehow, despite feeling the braided rope and the hangman’s noose on the end of it coiling around his throat once more.

Daniel lets go of his curls and his arms fall limply back to his sides. He drops his shield, he surrenders all of his weapons, and then he slowly shakes his head and looks back at Max.  
“No, I don’t”, he answers. His eyes widen as if the exact conclusion had come as a surprise to him as well, the lights in him flicker and pulsate. “I don’t.”

Max doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore. The desire to go and take a hold of Daniel is more than he can bear; yet he feels thin-skinned and scalded and can’t gather the strength to move and touch Daniel. Not with his body, not with his heart, not unless Daniel lets him.  
“It’s pretty fucking hard to take, all of this”, says Daniel still, keeping his wounds from closing this time, forcing himself to bleed now, bleed dry. “I’ve never... never in my life. And I was able to take it for as long as I didn’t think you were in this mess too, y’ know, as long as I thought that I was just being- stupid, or whatever, all by myself.”

Max still can’t bring himself to say a word, he stays where he is and watches. It almost feels like an exsanguination of Daniel, a ritual of purification, done through words of mouth.

“But then you- you did what you did”, Daniel whispers, visibly shaking but refusing to look away from Max this time, and it would seem like an act of some kind of bravado if Daniel didn’t look so completely torn to mere fragments of himself. “And my only guess is that it means that you’re in this mess _with me_ , Max. And it’s more fucking _scary_ as a thought than I could’ve ever imagined.”  
He has to stop to gasp for air and it is only at that moment that Max thinks he understands. They are the ones bare and broken now, without their suits of armour and their weapons reduced pointless, trying to unshatter themselves. The rift of _what if_ stretches even wider before him and between them, wider, ever wider, and Daniel is there on the other side of it, barely in his sight.  
“I know”, he says, almost inaudible, but Daniel finally saying his name again feeling like a plea for answers, consolation, anything at all.  
“Because what if we... what if I somehow end up wanting more?” breathes Daniel, faltering and more lost for words than Max can remember him having ever been in all their times together. “Something more than this, more than there’s been? What the hell would we do _then_ , if we had to go our separate ways with _more_ than what we’ve had so far?”

It _is_ scarier as a thought than Max could have ever imagined. He’s being ripped in half by how that _more_ is everything he has been wishing for for such a long time, and it is almost, _almost_ within his reach now; yet it still feels so distant, a figment of his imagination. He can’t take it from Daniel nor give it to him with force, and he knows how right Daniel is, he learned it the hard way and he knows.  
“Do you?” he asks, has to stop the first attempt mid-sentence, once again hearing himself voice the question rather than consciously asking it. “Do you want that?”

And when Daniel slowly shakes his head, curls gently swaying to the mellow movement, Max feels nothing but blue numbness at first. He gets ready to leave Daniel as he is and exit in fatal defeat -

until Daniel chokes “I don’t know, Max, I just honestly don’t know” and turns Max upside down once again. _What if_ , screams the void in front of him, pulls him under with a volley of _what if_.  
“I understand”, he answers. And he does, he does understand, there is no venom nor acid on his tongue anymore.  
“I don’t know how I still can _not know_ when this shit is pretty much all I’ve thought about for a long time already besides the contract madness”, says Daniel as if ashamed, as if in an apology, “but I just… don’t, not yet.”  
Max nods, doesn't know the right words so he tries to speak in a soundless language instead.  
“And it’s not about- I don’t hate you”, Daniel repeats once more and pierces through Max with the all-consuming dark of his eyes. “I think it’s… it's something from the opposite side of that, I reckon.”

Silence. Another. Max barely feels his own limbs, he is outside of himself again. There is nothing running in his veins but longing that seems irredeemable and blended with it something he is too overcome to truly call anything just yet.  
“But would you be able to bear with me for a while longer?” asks Daniel hesitantly. He is battling tears instead of Max and destined to lose in the end. Max has never seen him so fragile, feather-like; he would move if he still wasn’t so afraid of making Daniel break with a single brush of his hand.  
“Can you just- give me a little time to sort myself out?”

Max nods again. He would give Daniel everything.  
“Yeah, of course”, he says. It's not much he can get past the stranglehold that has made its way back around his neck, but with enough force he still manages to out the words needed. “It’s okay. Anything.”

A warped sound escapes from Daniel’s mouth. He is still trying to bite it back but only half succeeds, he lifts his thumb and runs it over his cheek. And Max can’t take it, not anymore. He crosses the distance between them again, crosses all of those light years in mere fractions of his heartbeats, and carefully threads his arms around Daniel and ties him in his embrace. Not like a full-blown assault now but like a zephyr, tender and healing; and he lifts a hand to gently, ever so lightly, brush the back of Daniel’s neck when he feels Daniel’s body starting to tremble.  
“I’m sorry”, he mumbles, and this time he is.

  



	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jeepers, I thought only a couple of weeks had passed since the latest chapter... doesn't time fly when you're writing questionable fuckery! Anyway, here's finally some more, uh, slightly less questionable trying-to-get-to-the-fuckery-but-only-getting-to-being-fucked-up-ery. Archive warning: this work industriously continues being sad and weird.

  
But Sunday begins with more ease despite nothing seeming to have come to an undisputed close.

They keep glancing at each other from their own separate sides, from their distances in the garage, and they see each other in high definition. They take notice of each other’s details, drown into them time and time again. Max catches Daniel watching him, not with a summery grin on his lips like always so far but a warm, tender breath of a smile ghosting on them instead; and if anything, it makes Max long for him even more. Stealing looks at Daniel and imagining what it would be like was hard enough for him as it was; now just the thought of _what if_ makes it all almost too much, the possibility of it being within his reach forms a loop of fantasy that chains him to place. He finds himself thinking about walking to Daniel across an empty garage and pressing his lips against that smile of his, kissing until the smile would turn into a sigh and into lust.

And then in the afternoon Max scores a podium, Daniel’s car fails him again, and everything seems to go to south with that once more.

Max is a racing driver and he knows the queer, ridiculous single-mindedness of racing drivers through and through. They live and breathe racing above and beyond all, the pungent smell of burning tyres lingers in their lungs long after they have left the trackside and their blood is nothing but a hyper-inflammable mixture of petrol and adrenaline. Driving transcends all and what happens on the track affects everything; and even though Max knows it might not make any sense to anyone on the outside of it all, he is still quite unsure about what to make of the results, and he has to admit to himself that he is, besides elated with his third place, a cluster of nerves after the race.

It has never got to him on these levels before. The race results and Daniel’s evasive luck touch something in him this time none of it has never had power over earlier. There has been frustration and disappointment, sure, on both sides and more than he considers necessary, and there has been triumph and an almost vertiginous kind of joy. And it has somehow always been plain and effortless for them to share it all. Take the wins and take the losses and make neat halves of all of it for both of them to carry. They have had their respectful distances to keep, they have had their undisclosed wills and the weights of things unspoken and they have been able to shield themselves with secrecy. Now it feels like parts of them had merged together, having been welded with the blowtorch of their mutual turmoil; and what happens to one vibrates and resounds in the other. They orbit each other and obey each other’s laws of gravity;

and it makes Max sense rather than hear the footsteps that lead to and stop behind the door of his driver room at a nonspecific point after the race, and he knows it's Daniel long before the hesitant knocks and the muffled _‘s me_ reach his ears. It just has to be Daniel. They are surrounded by tens and tens of people and the world addicted to speed around them never comes to a standstill, yet for the last few days they have been to each other the last people on a deserted planet, enclosed in a bubble made of glass and things out of their grasp.

He has locked the door earlier to prevent anything - sounds, words, thoughts - from escaping his own small space there and letting itself loose on the corridors. He rises to let Daniel in and thinks about how twisted it is, that he knows perfectly well who it is yet has no way of knowing what he is going to encounter. The blue of Max’s eyes meets the black of Daniel’s at the door, through the narrow opening; and someone mutes the world around them at that instant, every sound now recoils from the air surrounding the two. Daniel appears somehow diminished and it makes Max’s insides clench again. Fuck, he has felt almost nothing but sick and nauseous for the whole weekend, for the past few weeks, ever since the _news_ , and there seems to exist no cure for that.

“G’ day”, Daniel says and leans against the doorframe, his posture effortless but features and edges tainted by woe. He doesn't shift, doesn’t carefreely grant himself the permission to enter like so many times before. “Can I?”  
“Yeah, sure”, answers Max, tries to bend the corner of his mouth up but isn’t actually sure whether he pulls it off. God, how _small_ Daniel looks, how worn and empty, a fire gone out, having left nothing but charred remains behind. Max turns away from the door and instantly hates the act of turning his back to Daniel for some reason, it's a heart-wrenching thing to do at this moment, but he trusts Daniel to follow him and lock the door. He hears the click, senses the movement, drops his phone on the table and turns to face Daniel. 

“So... Alrighty”, Daniel starts, circling helplessly around in his head like wounded prey.  
“Are you okay?” asks Max, wondering how a question that trivial can sound so unbelievably awkward and idiotic as he voices it; but it seems to be the only thing he can think of saying, something of a starting point. And then Daniel says _yeah, yeah_ because it serves as a reflex and it just comes out of his mouth at any given time, no matter how not okay he is.  
“I just… I first thought that I came here to congratulate you on your podium”, continues Daniel after a moment of buzzing quiet, wandering off and back on the trail he roams. His gaze finally fixes and focuses on Max’s, and Max wouldn’t be able to drag his eyes away even if he so wished. “I thought I could simply pop in to do that.”

Silence. Another. Max is almost about to say _I understand_ as expected, but something about Daniel shackles his tongue and then Daniel speaks again.

“But now that I’m here… I’m not exactly sure why that is.”

Had it been any other weekend, any given moment only a few weeks ago, a passing figment in an alternative timeline, Max would have smiled a dry smile and said something. Something along the friendly, frail lines of _yeah, I’m sorry for your bad luck, it sucks, but it will get better_. Now Max can’t bring himself to say anything. His thoughts wander along a thousand different lines and every single one of those lines connects in the point that is Daniel in front of him, Daniel with his aches and vulnerabilities. But he nods, aiming for reassurance.  
“It’s okay” is the best he can come up with. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”

Daniel nods in his turn and bites his lip, and Max knows that Daniel is still going to say anything, everything, no matter what Max might tell him.  
“I probably shouldn’t have come here at all”, is what Daniel says first, raw and true. “I’m as fucked up as my car is and I don’t want to drag you down with me, y’ know, and… make you feel as shitty as I feel. You should be out there celebrating, tits out and all.”  
“No, it’s okay”, responds Max quickly again, for some reason desperate to keep Daniel to himself for a while now that he has come, no matter how short and painful, no matter what the outcome. “I… I’m just sorry for you, to be honest. I really think you deserve more than that.” 

Daniel stares at Max with an expression so filled with agitation and longing it makes Max want to-  
“You mess me up, Max”, says Daniel all of a sudden, with a desperate edge to his voice. “You’re like that and you… I can’t believe this is happening. I thought that trying to decide what to do next year with all this was hard, but… Shit, I didn’t have a fucking clue, did I.”  
Daniel combs his restless fingertips through his hair and Max is unable to rid the feeling that the time he gave Daniel only yesterday evening is starting to be up.  
“I had it all planned”, continues Daniel, speaking to himself as much as he is speaking to Max. “I had my pathetic play pretend all sorted out, down to the last tiny detail. You messed it all up.”

Silence. Another. Max is almost about to say _I’m sorry_ again but he shackles his own tongue this time. There twirls an air of crackling electricity around them and Max settles for waiting instead of words - for what, he can’t quite pinpoint, but he _waits_.

Daniel takes a step closer like entranced, eyes locked onto Max’s. He lifts a hand on Max’s left shoulder and slowly curls his long fingers around it; he pins his thumb in the tender place where the bone and flesh and nerves of Max’s shoulder meet his pectoral and presses a little harder than necessary, either intentionally or in the haze of the moment and with the adrenaline still fogging the outlines of his mind. For a moment it’s almost eerily quiet. Max hears the feverish drumming of his own pulse in his ears and echoes Daniel’s, as if Daniel’s hand on that point of Max’s body, so close to his chest, had linked their hearts and made them rush to the same uncontrolled tempo-

“ _Shit_ , Max, you really fuck me up”, says Daniel, still in place, divided and splintered by how much he has lost, how much he wants and how much he fears-

and then he leans in, dives headfirst in shallow waters and kisses Max, fierce, ends up almost slamming against him. Max stops breathing, he tries to use his lungs and his windpipe but they refuse to function and co-operate. 

Daniel pulls back, gasps for air; his eyes are wide, black mirrors of an off kind of confusion, as if he wasn’t quite sure himself about the deed he has done and whether it actually was a good idea at all. Max feels like he is floating outside of himself again yet sensing everything at once with every screaming nerve ending of his body.  
“ _Fuck_ ”, says Daniel again, and Max would laugh at Daniel’s unusual lack of eloquence if he wasn’t so focused on trying to adapt to Daniel, trying to match his pace, but then Daniel does it again, attacks him with an impact not unlike their first, steals Max’s breath and robs him of his chances. Daniel’s hold on Max's shoulder hasn’t loosened for a second and Max feels him fumble and then grip his shirt as well, and the feeling of Daniel’s fingers clenching and stretching the dark fabric around his waist throws Max to an unexpected depth of _doubt_ \- it’s ridiculous, Daniel kissing him is more than he could have asked for in his most imaginative prayers only this morning, yet now it feels violent and off, the way they keep colliding and crashing against each other, shards of them both shooting in all directions. And he can’t help still thinking that _that’s not how I want it to go_ , there’s not a moment’s calm and the constant onslaughts and explosions will do nothing but taint them in the end.

He places his hands on Daniel’s chest, wherever he manages with Daniel so tightly pressed against him, tries to sigh _Daniel_ against his lips, _Daniel, you don’t have to_ \- and then he suddenly finds himself having to try to shove Daniel away when Daniel misreads him and shifts to push him backwards. Max is disoriented and has no idea whether he would end up back against the wall or stumble and fall onto the _sofa_ , with Daniel crashing on top of him, when they would eventually run out of space and _no_ , not like this, Daniel is way too beside himself.  
“Daniel”, manages Max to grunt into his mouth, jerking his arms and burying the heels of his palms deep in the most sensitive parts of Daniel's sides he can think of to try and make his point. “ _Daniel_ , hey, calm down.”

Daniel stills, paralyzes. He lets the fabric slip from his uncoiling fist, loses the grip he has put on Max’s shoulder and breaks the chain of their heartbeats when he lifts his thumb from the juncture he has had it pressed in. A long, trembling breath falls from between his lips like an apology when he moves his body from Max’s and looks at him, as if assessing the damage.  
“Shit, Max- I’m”, he stammers, filled with shame and disbelief in himself, air moving through him harsh and desperate. “I’m sorry, I should go, I really shouldn’t have come- not so soon after... after the race, I’m just- too fucked up and angry. I'd better go.”

“It’s-”, starts Max and then wipes the corner of his lip, as if wiping the words he was almost about to say away from his mouth along with the spit. The frustration he is trying to suppress takes a hold of his hands and makes them tremble. He can’t bring himself to say _it’s okay_ again, other words write themselves on his tongue and he reads them aloud without further thinking and without bothering to veil the strain in his voice.  
“You can’t do that any more than I can”, he says - he feels like he is deliberately trying to stick a spike somewhere between Daniel’s ribs again but _fuck_ if this isn’t exactly what they went through when Max _did what he did_. “I’ll give you time. As much as you want. I'll do whatever is necessary. But you can’t deal with me by just having a meltdown on me and then trying to get rid of me.”

Daniel's mouth falls open at him being hit so ruthlessly with the words of his own making. His eyes are golden and gleaming and wide, and Max swears he would take a hold of Daniel’s neck and crash their mouths together, hard and wanting, had he not done so only a couple of days ago and plunged them into the abyss of fear and alienation they are in now. 

“I- we can’t keep going like this for long”, whispers Daniel in absolute horror. “ _Shit_ , I… I'd kind of want to take the chance here, Max, but at the same time I'm fucking terrified. I’m scared of myself and I’m scared of you and I’m scared of this fucking sport where you can’t even, I dunno, fart without someone shoving their damn microphone up your ass. And I know I sound pathetic when I say it like that, but- I’m so goddamn _scared_ more than anything and I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”

Max’s heart tries to beat its way through his chest. _What if_.  
“I know”, he says, pulling the spike out of Daniel and not trying to thrust it through him any longer. He would have laughed at Daniel’s half-hearted joke in an alternative timeline again, but he knows the pain it is there to mask all too well for that. He feels like he is standing on the verge of coming undone himself now, batting his eyelids to try and lose the burn behind them. “It’s hard. This is... I think it's not what is supposed to happen, after all.”  
Daniel lets out a strangled chuckle and shakes his head. “Yeah, you could say it like that.”

He looks back at Max and Max is so lost yet again, he doesn't know what to do, he doesn't know what to say, he doesn't know anything anymore either except how much he wants Daniel, in some way, any way. It just has to be Daniel, again.  
“Fuck, Max, what are we going to do?”, asks Daniel, again from himself as much as from Max and not waiting for an answer since neither of them has one. “I said that I want time but I also kinds feel like there’s no amount of time that would make anything any clearer for me. It’s all a mess and… and you’re right in the middle of it with me, y’ know.”  
“I don't know”, admits Max, there's no signpost to cue him. “But you said what I would have said as well, I-”

He has to stop to swallow because for some reason he can’t believe he is actually going to say the words he is going to say. It's a fever dream and still truer than anything, and his mouth is dry and his lungs are numb. “I would want to give this a chance as well and- Jesus, I want you, Daniel. But you’re right, it’s terrifying. And you're leaving.”

The last two of his words are a slap in both their faces yet as unavoidable as are things like sunrise and sunset and meeting one's own teammate on a race weekend. It’s there, it would be there and it would eat them alive even if it was left unspoken, and the truth of it simply takes them both and slays them to where they are standing. Daniel bites his lip again and glances down, like he had suddenly become aware of the fact himself, that he is the version of himself that is leaving. And then his eyes widen again.  
“You just said that you-”

There’s a sharp knock on the door all of a sudden and they both startle, and their bubble made of glass and things out of their grasp suddenly bursts and leaves violent shock waves behind.  
“Max? Are you there, Max?” asks someone from behind the door, someone most likely perfectly familiar yet right at this moment nothing but foreign. “Sorry for having to disturb you, there’s just a couple of things that need to be sorted.”

Max shakes his head in a rampant surge of annoyance but has no choice. For a moment he does consider not responding - staying dead silent, only breathing in and out with Daniel until whoever it is trying to find him would shrug and head to look elsewhere - but it’s a doomed idea and somehow Max knows that Daniel understands.  
“Yeah, just give me a minute, Daniel is here”, he answers in an unfittingly _normal_ cadence before looking at Daniel again, and there wafts an aura of defeat around them both.  
“We were just in the middle of the sorting, for fuck’s sake”, whispers Daniel and lets a saddened smile twist his mouth, and Max’s quiet chuckle is diluted and lukewarm at best. Daniel glances at him one more time; Max can’t recall the last time he has felt so completely adolescent, a heartbroken teenager caught in the middle of a secret rendezvous, having someone in his room that isn’t perhaps supposed to be there yet is.

Then he thinks _fuck it_ as he gathers the fragments of courage left in him, takes a hold of Daniel’s elbow and places a light kiss on his lips before having to let him slip through his fingers.

Daniel still looks saddened when he opens his eyes, having instinctively closed them at the soft, bittersweet touch. And then he is gone and someone else enters Max’s room and he is left to sort out the completely wrong things altogether.  



	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It would seem now that for every chapter of this utter chaos of a story there also occurs something between 4000 and 7000 words of porn, or the other way round.. :D Go figure. Anyway, more mayhem ensues - time to live up to the vague promise in the tags. I thought about moving the rating up because this chapter has a slightly rough-ish start, but... I think you'll live? Tell me if you think that it needs to be M instead of T, I'll change it if that's the case.
> 
> Oh, and: of course a big thank you (jeepers, how I sometimes love quoting the phrases certain drivers use time and time again :D) to everyone who has taken the time to read this, or even parts of this, so far. You all mean the world :) <3  
> 

The short interlude between the first act that is Spa and the second act that is Monza sees Max throwing up three more times, once after a workout he knowingly takes beyond every single limit of his system - and that is still not at all enough to serve as the reboot he is desperately chasing after - and twice after nightmares, vivid and violent to the point of crashing into the edges of his tolerance; and he dreams both exceedingly obscene and paralyzingly abysmal dreams to such extent that he finds himself fearing that he is going to lose his mind before the end of the season, once and for all.

He holds a gun to Daniel's head and says _I hope good things will come out of it_ before one swift movement of his fingers paints the dream with dark red sorrow. Daniel tightens the noose around Max’s neck once again, gaze swimming with saltwater before locking their eyes and making the ground beneath their feet vanish. He kisses Daniel, he holds Daniel close and caresses his hair, he slams Daniel chest against the garage wall and tears his overalls down, fucks him there until their sweat and come smear the images exploding to him, bites his teeth into Daniel's shoulder. Daniel pins Max into the seat of a dark blue Vanquish, presses his palm against his aching cock and Max wakes up to his own orgasm, shaking, drenched in shame and need.

Max is not at all sure about whether he can handle seeing Daniel again after everything, or whether he would even _want_ to see Daniel again, but there is of course no other option to him; and the merciless inevitability of meeting one’s own teammate on a race weekend makes his gut wrench and boil one time after another. What he will most likely face is a very different Daniel to the one before, yet Max has no way of knowing in exactly which way that is. He and Daniel have barely messaged each other during the few days apart, let alone called. And Max doesn’t know whether it is out of decency or dread, where the limits of the two clash and mix with each other, but something stops him from asking for any answers through text and pixel-painted emotions. If there is something that can not be settled with vague captions and quickly scribbled abbreviations, it is this.

They land in Italy and they keep glancing at each other from their distances again, their horizons filled with confusion and insecurity. The question _what’s happening?_ is written all over both their faces, a riddle that is never answered; they film a video together again and when Max sees parts of it afterwards, he almost cringes at the awkwardness they both all but radiate as they are trying to act like they somehow are the same Max and the same Daniel that returned from their summer breaks over a week ago and have been almost nothing but messed up and lost and scared of each other ever since. That they are the same Max and the same Daniel they were before they collided and collapsed together for the first time. He only just bites it back, just, swallows the fear and wishfulness threatening to display themselves on his face.

“You know that we need to talk again, right?” Daniel whispers to Max from the corner of his mouth once they get a break, from behind his shield of sunglasses and smiles; he brushes Max’s elbow with just the arches of his knuckles and to Max it still feels like a whiplash, sweet and all too much. Oh God, it brings back to Max the nightly figments of his imagination, projects the extremities of both his disgrace and desire upon his eyelids; he can barely glance at Daniel without an overwhelming gush of mortification gripping his insides and making him burn.  
“Yeah, I know”, he answers nevertheless. “It’s going to be late before we can do that, but- before practices, right?”  
“Yeah, before practices. We can’t drive otherwise”, says Daniel in a soft echo and his touch melts the skin in places where his knuckles lightly run down along Max’s arm and take flight from above the bones in his wrist. It seems like such a small, insignificant gesture to anyone but them, something everybody is almost expecting to happen between them at any given moment yet something that to them is now uncharted and unfamiliar in every way despite the two having carelessly laid their fingers and their hands on each others dozens and dozens of times before.

“I missed you, y’ know”, whispers Daniel again, so silent that Max almost doubts for a moment whether Daniel actually said anything at all or whether it was a distant roar of an engine or a wind-sculpted sound twisting itself into words in his ears. Daniel then nods at someone walking past them in an unbearably normal, everyday manner; it makes Max’s blood boil with something between utter shock and inexplicable yearning, the way they can be completely re-inventing themselves and what they are to each other without appearing at all new to anyone looking from the other side of their rebuilt bubble of glass and things out of their grasp.  
“I missed you too”, Max answers quietly and glances at Daniel again, still seeing nothing but his own hopes and simultaneous hopelessness reflecting back to him from the lenses of Daniel’s glasses, desperate to catch Daniel’s eyes instead. Saying it out loud somehow makes it all the more real - oh, as if he could reach to coil his fingers around their shared longing. “I’ll be there.”

Daniel gives him a smile, gentle and calm. Max can't tell if it still is grief-ridden like it was when Max last saw it, not with the true nature of it concealed by a pair of sunglasses glimmering in the daylight and hiding the glimmer behind them.

And he goes to see Daniel late that night; he is still nauseous but slightly less so, in parts of him the nausea has reluctantly made way to plain, comfortingly simple uncertainty and other parts of him feel something resembling fragile anticipation and frayed hope. He thinks of the last time he has seen Daniel, it swerves on the edges of his consciousness and the words _I want you, Daniel_ suddenly strike him like a fist again, a blow to his brain -

did he say - did he _really_ say -

or was it just another one of those delirious, consuming images from the thin, wavering trapeze above the line separating his fantasies and nightmares?

But once he meets Daniel at his door once again, he knows that he did and he knows it to still be true. Max explores the curve of Daniel’s back as he leans against the door before gesturing Max in, the impossibility of his curls and the soft edges of his cheeks; he inescapably remembers claiming Daniel against the garage wall in his dreams and his stomach turns with an overflow.

“So, how have you been holding up?” Daniel asks once they are seated on the sofa. It would amuse Max how they always seem to end up unraveling their thoughts on different sofas and how Daniel always sits with his other leg bent under him, carefree and sunny, if the memories of the previous times they have done so didn’t feel so far gone now and bittersweet. It is all something out of the lives of a very different Max and a very different Daniel.  
“I’ve been… good, I guess”, lies Max - he can’t exactly tell what drives him to say so in the end, that somehow having had his nights filled with visions of the two tearing each other apart in every possible way, physical and mental, literal and figurative, is in any sense an equivalent to having done _good_. But it still is the first answer that comes to him, the answer he thinks Daniel is expecting, or the answer he thinks that Daniel can perhaps somehow _live with_. “How about you?”

Daniel bites his lip and half nods and Max knows that Daniel most likely sees right through him, as if Max was molded out of light and ice and water.  
“It’s been extremely weird lately”, Daniel says, honest and headstrong. Max instantly feels slightly ashamed about his persistent need to still somehow try to hide from Daniel, about his half-hearted attempt to patch his wounds up and stop any bleeding with a kind of forced defiance when Daniel has already witnessed his worst moment of frailty and they are both still shaken by the aftershocks of that exact impact.  
“I’ve had a lot of dreams about you for the past few nights”, Daniel continues. He measures and weighs every single one of his words before saying them. “Good and bad. I haven’t slept very well. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

Max feels such a fierce, fiery need to reach out and take a hold of Daniel’s hand and yet- shit, he _kissed_ Daniel, for fuck’s sake, and Daniel did the same, and it feels like they touch each other more often than they don’t, both on and off camera. He has dreamed of doing to Daniel every unspoken, unimaginable thing, both willingly and unwillingly; but now the act of laying his fingers on the back of Daniel’s hand and threading them between his feels all too forceful because of how much it would seem to mean. Daniel’s eyes are deep and pitch black, full of stars, and Max keeps staring into them and drowning in them.  
“Yeah, me too”, Max says, forces the words past the dryness that has settled in his throat and mouth. “That’s how good I’ve been as well, if I’m really being honest.”

Daniel’s mouth curves. Max thinks of pressing his lips gently against that coy upward arch but doesn’t move, not an inch.  
“I’m sorry about last weekend”, Daniel says, glances down and shakes his head. “I mean- about what I ended up doing to you and the way I acted.”  
“No, I understand it”, Max answers. He is taken aback by the soft sincerity he encounters in Daniel and unable to stop his senses from sharpening and screaming. “I think I started it, after all, and I’m sorry about messing you up so bad and... messing everything up.”  
“That’s what you did”, Daniel says and nods again, the air in his words is different, mellow - there is the sense of fragile but all the more awaited peace surrounding him once again, and it makes no sense, the way the _stillness_ makes Max’s heart pound so feverishly. “You really did. But in a very weird and twisted way I’m almost glad that you did. It was a shock, but- now I kind of wish that I had had the brains and the guts to react to everything a bit differently a long time ago already.”

There they are, sitting on a sofa in Daniel’s room, and the sudden calm around and between them brings Daniel so strikingly close to Max’s reach - oh God, he could - but it still makes touching Daniel in any way, with his body and with his heart, so much more difficult with the distracting anger and the storm of fear and woe now absent. It is not a _version_ , any version, of Daniel any longer that is seated in front of him, resting his head against the back of his hand and gazing at Max with an unexpected kind of clarity softening his eyes and mouth. What Max is facing this time is nothing but Daniel, the same Daniel as always. 

“What I want to ask is- you said on Sunday, before I left, or I was forced to leave” starts Daniel, making Max's heart jolt and then speed up. “We said and did a lot of things last weekend, but I kind of got stuck on the moment when you said that you'd want to take the chance and that... you want me.”

Max completely malfunctions and once again he can barely make out the contents of his own mind over the gunfire-like ringing of his own pulse in his ears and the _what if_ that keeps repeating itself to him. 

“I haven't been able to let go of that one”, Daniel continues; there is no mockery, no poison, no acid on his tongue, as if all of that had oozed out of him and sank into the soil and evaporated in the air of Spa. All that’s left is Daniel. Summertime glow and scorch. Max kisses him over and over again in his head and still doesn't move, not an inch-!  
“And I've been thinking- I reckon I know the answer, or parts of it at least, but I still kinda want to hear it from you yourself… in what sense did you mean that?”

Oh lord how badly Max is torn, torn into pieces of inevitable shame and yet something he recognizes as pure, uncut kind of lust.  
“I meant in every sense”, he answers - the quiet sound is all he can force out of his mouth and start with, his hands are trembling and his words tremble and his whisper trembles as well. “I’m not going to lie, it still scares me to say it. But there is also nothing for me to hide anymore, I think I revealed everything last week when I- did what I did. I think of you as something I probably shouldn't and I have thought that for a long time and I just can’t… help it.”

Daniel’s gaze is infinite. A warm, endless night. There is something in the situation that is similar to the one a week ago, Max vaguely recognizes his own words - and was it really only a week ago when it feels like such a long time has passed since that day already that Max’s memories are blurred, their outlines smudged; or are the memories only being blurred by the fear and insecurity that broke through them and concealed them from each other?

But Max still wants, in every possible sense.

Yet Daniel is the first to move. He lifts his head and straightens his arm; his movement casts a spell on Max, he follows the flow of Daniel’s hand and his fingers in a hazy high, lips parting in a word or a question or a sentence that never makes its way out. And once Daniel’s fingertips brush his temple, as they stay still for a while before slowly trailing a path down his cheek and stop on his jaw, Max is not sure whether he is even breathing any longer or has Daniel stolen his air with the touch. There is nothing but their heartbeats, their silent thoughts breaking and halting.  
“I have never”, Daniel says, wandering off and back on the trail he roams again, full of dream and wonder and eyes darting all over Max’s face. “Never in my life.”

Max lifts his hand to gently lay it on the one Daniel still keeps on his jaw, to carefully coil it in the embrace of his fingers at last, _at last_ , Daniel's breath hitches again even though his mouth is slightly open and ready for taking air in, and-  
“I know”, Max says. “I’m so sorry about what I did to you, I- didn’t mean to fuck everything up like that.”

Their joint hands stay still but Max feels Daniel moving his fingers, and he can’t help sighing at the feeling of Daniel’s thumb just barely brushing the corner of his lip. It feels like a fever dream again: and maybe it is a fever dream, a fantasy soon to be broken, but he wants to watch it through and then press replay, again and again, for forever.  
“I still don’t know where and how we’ll end up if we go with any of this, y’ know”, Daniel says, as if knowingly interrupting the spiral of Max’s thoughts and doubts. “I know you don’t know either. There is no way of promising anything for either of us. Not with what we do for a living and what it takes from us. And it can be that no matter how much we both want, even that isn’t enough to get us very far.”

Max vaguely registers the way his mouth slightly gapes, a reflex as much out of his powers as are Daniel’s words, but he somehow manages to nod, cheek brushing against Daniel’s fingers.  
“I know”, he says once again, helpless to stop himself from repeating it time and time again; the blunt, melancholy truthfulness in what Daniel has said is unavoidable, and Max realizes it, and he knows not to fight it.  
“But I think that in the end... “ Daniel starts, pauses as if he had lost the rest of the sentence while being right in the middle of it, looks for the words that escaped him from Max’s face, from the depths of his eyes. “You didn’t fuck everything up in the end. Or you definitely did, but… now that it has come to this, I want this as well. All of the crap we’ve been through, both together and in our own corners, y’ know- it would have been for nothing if we just dropped everything. I didn’t keep completely going to fucking pieces by myself for weeks and months just to chicken out now that this thing has… surfaced.”

All halts once more, everything.

“Are you sure?” asks Max, his mind swimming, and he realizes the paradox as soon as he has spoken, the certain kind of needlessness of his question. “Or- well.”  
“No”, says Daniel and smiles again, a small peak of warmth spilling over his edges and spreading across the room like floodwater. “I’m not. We can’t be sure of anything. I’m still leaving the team after this season and I’m still absolutely fucking scared and I don’t know anything about anything. I can’t promise anything. You can’t either and you know that. But I don’t want to have any regrets in my life. And what I do know is that I would regret not seeing this through even in my grave.”

Max nods again, oh God, if only he could bring himself to fucking _say_ something instead, shit, anything - Daniel is leaving yet they now feel more tightly bound to each other by the gravity they share than ever before, and somehow Max can’t shake the feeling that all of their steps would have been left untaken without their eventual parting setting things in motion.  
“Yeah, me too”, he says, having gotten completely stripped of his words, stripped of his voice, of his ability to think and speak. “Let’s just… see how things continue from here, right?”  
“Yeah, exactly”, breathes Daniel - and their hands still haven’t moved and Max’s fingers are full of pins and needles but he is almost afraid to loosen his grip on Daniel, as if letting go of him would mean that the moment he wakes up and sees the blackness of his own room instead of Daniel again is upon him.

Daniel leans closer in like without realizing it himself and Max mirrors him in a blissful trance.  
“There’s one thing that I do regret, though”, Daniel whispers. Max feels a shadow of his breath on his face and it still feels like a cold gust of wind cutting through him despite everything that they have just disclosed and unleashed.  
“What is it?” he asks, thinking of all of the myriad things between them he has rendered irredeemably unchangeable with his words and actions; thinking of everything they can’t promise each other yet what he knows he is still going to try to give to Daniel for as long as Daniel lets him, reaching out to Daniel with his heart and with his body. And Daniel - to Hell with him, Daniel flashes a passing grin in a way that makes Max want to first hit then kiss him when he _fucking_ answers by saying “there’s no denying that our first kiss kinda sucked”.

Max finally lets go of Daniel’s hand and moves to make his fingertips sway on the skin of Daniel’s cheek.  
“I’m sorry about that as well”, he says - he does feel a sting for Daniel is right. There is no denying it and there is no escaping the way it still doesn’t appear to him as a kiss as much as it appears as an impact, nothing but an explosion, violent and wrong. “I did fuck that up pretty bad.”

There shimmers a spark in Daniel and Max wants nothing more than to start a fire.

“You’ll have to give it another try”, Daniel whispers, breathless and consumed and-

and Max closes the distance between them to gently press his lips against Daniel’s. Not like a full-blown assault but a zephyr again, tender and healing, and Daniel opens his mouth and his heart to Max in response.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Also: this is the first story of mine to cross the limit of 10 000 words! Yay! I don't know if anyone of you would like to join me when I pop open the fricking champagne but yay anyway!)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pheewww! I confess, school caught me for a moment there and I actually managed to force myself to school instead of messing around here, omg. But now, have this intermission serving as a bridge connecting the things that have taken place and the things that still will take place. To sound like Galadriel here or something :D

“It changes nothing”, says Daniel after hours and hours of sour silence that he punctures and breaks with the words, “but I sure fucking wish this won’t keep happening.”

Monza is chaos and ends in a low. They are both fuming and frustrated on Sunday evening, actively trying to not have any memories of the weekend at all except for the shift in what exists between them. The free practices are a mediocre mess as is the qualifying, the rain and engine penalties and lapses in concentration mix into something that is as grey and smudged as the skies stretching above them; and it all comes down to Max being denied a podium and Daniel being denied everything once again. And for all they have said and done in the past handful of days, they still feel like they have no starting point, no guidelines or blueprint, for searching for solace in each other now that they _have_ each other in a way still unknown to them.

Neither of them could have predicted how hard it would be to give and receive something as simple as affection.

They sit in unbroken silence on the plane afterwards, opposite each other, in lavishly comfortable business class seats that can do nothing to comfort them. It certainly isn’t anything they haven’t done dozens of times before and the setting bears the kind of familiarity that is completely unwanted - Daniel has hid himself behind his earphones as always and his eyes are fixed on the window in a quiet, empty way that tells Max he isn’t really looking out of it at all but viewing the depths of himself instead of the world around them. Max has his eyes fixed on his phone in the exact same way, searching for something but finding nothing, and he can’t help sinking into the disappointment yet to ebb away despite knowing that wallowing in it will not solve a thing. And he can’t help glancing at Daniel every now and then over the edge of the screen, wondering what would happen if he tried to reach out to him, wondering whether Daniel circles similar spirals of thoughts in his head or if he's still too lost in himself for that.

They have quickly grown somehow eager to take back both the time lost and the present they don’t have much left at all, pulling each other into quick kisses in their driver rooms and stealing touches and looks at every possibility that presents itself. It is sweet and intoxicating, dizzying in how illicit and unreal it feels -

and it is an ordeal.

In a way it feels like a second but very different impact, the uncontrollable stream of feelings they have been able to unleash yet now have to try and keep in check wherever they go. Concealing absolutely everything from each other as well as everyone on the outside had been devastating and coldly simple in its seeming hopelessness. Now that they _know_ , they are freed and yet constantly balancing, moving yet dragging the weight of their feelings on the end of a chain while doing so. Doing and saying things as if they still were the same Max and the same Daniel while being something entirely else, completely new, and wondering where they finally push the boundaries to the point of snapping, where they cross the line into the territory of _too much_.

Max knows it's what he has wished for and he would not have it any other way, never - as he thinks, grimacing at his own sentimentality and still cherishing the ability to finally be able to be exactly as sentimental as he wants in peace. But it takes its toll, thinking of all of the moments sacrificed to the altar of their lonely yet mutual insecurity, lamenting the possibilities come and gone. And Max has never felt time oozing through his fingers as concretely and indisputably as he does now, as he does every time the truth that the season is going to reach its inevitable end in not even three months’ time crosses his mind.

 _Not even three months_. And how many months have they spent being what they were before? How many times did he look at Daniel during those months and imagine what it would be like, what he would be like?

Max wishes he could simply vomit that reality out of himself; but now that he would like to be nauseous for a moment, he is not.

He has tried frenziedly to grasp the passing hours and days instead, to furl his fingers around every second he gets with Daniel, to take in everything he can, desperate to take in even more. He presses his nose gently against Daniel’s neck once they are alone and breathes the scent of his skin and aftershave deep in as if trying to capture it in his lungs. He knots his fingers into Daniel’s fuzzy curls and combs through them, hoping to feel every single strand of hair individually and that his hands would endlessly recall the feeling of them. He tries to absorb and encapsulate the warmth Daniel radiates against him, willing his body to be able to remember and resound it in the darkest moments of winter.

And Daniel does the same, tries to file everything he can, Max’s air and feel and essence. Max catches Daniel staring time and time again and then flashing a quick smile or a wink the second he realizes he’s been trapped, and Daniel keeps touching him at every possibility - not excessively, and maybe it’s just about Max registering every casual brush and pat more clearly than he did before; but he finds himself having to resist a content sigh every time he feels Daniel laying a carefree palm on his shoulder. Or his upper arm, or the curve of his hip, or the small of his back, dear gods, Daniel won’t stop marking him all the time with the touch of his hands-! In the garage, in their cramped driver rooms, under the eyes of everyone around them and yet hidden.

Max likes it. He can’t deny it and, in the increasing absences of his usually polished self-control, doesn’t even want to. It warms him. The feeling of being wanted is good; the feeling of being wanted _by Daniel_ is still something else entirely. At given moments he does catch himself thinking about taking the touch further as soon as it happens, taking a hold of Daniel’s hand on his shoulder and guiding it along the lines of his body, and a shiver of both curiosity and uncertainty shakes him.

But now, as the silence between them is still unbroken and an immeasurable distance still separates their seats on the plane, it floats in and out of Max’s mind that _it can be that no matter how much we both want, even that isn’t enough to get us very far_.

Suddenly there is the rampant surge of annoyance once again, it quickly raises its head and lets loose a roar. Words not being said when they should have been said has led them to where they are now, along a short but all the more agonizing path of confusion and anger, and Max realizes he can cause no worse chaos with anything he does or says anymore.

He turns his eyes to his phone again and starts tapping, knowing better than to ask whether Daniel is okay and sending _can I do something?_ instead.

Daniel inevitably flinches and blinks when he feels the buzzing of his phone in his pocket, against his thigh. Max follows him, for some reason more nervous than he would like to admit to himself. Fuck, it’s only Daniel - and how he _hates_ using the word “only” when Daniel is all - and he knows that what Daniel feels for him, whatever it turns out to be in the end, is neither hate nor resentment. But once again he knows the queer, ridiculous single-mindedness of racing drivers through and through, and as Daniel finally gives in to his reluctant curiosity and starts to dig for the phone, there is no way of knowing how he is going to respond, or whether he is going to respond at all.

Max watches as Daniel carelessly glances at the screen, then stops to stare at it with a crease appearing between his eyebrows and looks up at Max. The pale, bland light turns the golden hue of his skin into something oddly harsh. His lip does tilt upwards before he turns his eyes back to the phone and starts writing, but Max is still not sure whether it actually is an attempt at a smile. 

_You could give me your car, seems to work so much better_

It’s bound to simply be a half-hearted, tired joke and Max realizes that perfectly well; but the overpowering irritation and resentment that strike him and blend with his compassion is something he could have never imagined feeling, not towards Daniel, not in a situation like this. And it’s exactly at that moment, as he thinks both _fuck you_ and _if only I could make your car work as well_ almost on top of each other, it properly dawns to him what Daniel meant when he said

 _there is no way of promising anything for either of us, not with what we do for living and what it takes from us_.

If only it had been anyone but a rival. Anyone but his teammate. Anyone but Daniel. But Daniel is what Max wants, in every sense, and he's hellbent to get through to him. Again.

Then Daniel switches the phone off for a moment and tugs his earphones down, leaving them hanging around his neck like a wreath braided out of metal, plastic and leatherette paddings, and meets Max’s gaze with a tired smile that still doesn’t resound in his eyes. And then he says it, “I sure fucking wish this won’t keep happening”, spits it out like the words were burning and blistering his tongue.

Max nods, an odd ripple of relief mixing with his itching frustration and the need to get something out of his system. “I know. I hope so too."  
“You were close”, Daniel says. It's an unnecessary recollection of the obvious but all the same an effort to relieve at least some of the stress that has built a wall in the air between their seats. “I’m sorry.”  
“Me too”, mutters Max despite the words feeling quite foreign in his mouth given the circumstances.  
“And sorry for, uh, joking about it”, continues Daniel and gives a small nod towards his phone, face flashing with a grimace and inevitable guilt. “I suck. 'S not your fault, I reckon.”  
“It’s not too bad. This just sucks in general”, answers Max; they look equally bland and snort almost in unison with their lips curving in misshapen non-smiles, but the oxygen they share is easier to breathe again, a thick veil of clouds drifts apart.

Daniel grabs his phone again and the fluorescent glow lights his jaw and cheekbones. Max follows him for a moment with his eyes before following his example. He sees movement right on the rims of his vision then, behind the edge of his phone screen; he barely registers how Daniel shifts and sinks a bit lower in his chair, his long legs and torn jeans stretching across the rift separating them. And then Max for some reason can’t take another breath in when he feels Daniel’s bony knee against his own.

He glances up, feeling almost ridiculously wary considering it’s still nothing glaring what Daniel does - but the plane is a small, cramped space, anyone could walk past, anyone could see-! Yet Daniel’s eyes are fixed only on him now instead of the window or the phone, restless and keen, and suddenly the simple sensation of Daniel’s knee resting against his own makes Max’s backbone tingle. And then Daniel moves again, _fuck_ , his back is long and his limbs reach far and he edges his knee further along Max’s inner thigh, following the seam on Max’s trousers and stopping halfway up. Max can’t tear his eyes off Daniel’s and Daniel’s are still glued on his when he repeats the movement, sliding his knee back down to meet Max’s and then up his thigh again, leaving what feels like a trail of burn marks on Max’s skin underneath all the fabric with every move. Daniel’s slouched posture deep in the seat is surely not as comfortable as it looks but as if anyone _cared_ at the moment, shit, as if anyone _could_ care with the air itself crackling around them.

Max has to use a good amount of force to break his gaze from Daniel’s and look at his phone again.

_what are you doing?_

Max glances straight back up after pressing _send_ despite knowing that Daniel must realize that the buzz in his pocket is him. Daniel looks somehow explosive and there is something Max can’t describe as anything but lure of danger that keeps flickering in the smirk on his lips when he taps his answer.

_up until the race the weekend was nice tho_

Max’s face flares with a rush of blood and memories. Daniel is not wrong.

_I agree_

They look back up from their phones simultaneously and Max feels an overpowering need to squirm and change his position yet doesn’t want to break the touch for one second, so he stays put and uncomfortable and heated.

It’s the kind of yearning, he realizes, that has no signposts in its horizon to guide it anywhere. None at all. It is nothing he has not felt before yet now it feels completely unmapped to him in its physicality, full of newness and unexpected uncertainty. Fantasizing, once he has given himself the permission to do that, has of course been easy. His head has been filled with images he has crafted, all clear and confident - how Daniel could feel under his touch when he’s glowing with sex and sweat, how Daniel could sound when they fuck, raw gasps for air and exhaustion still very different from the kind that follows a gym session, what it could feel like to be made to climax by Dan, oh _fuck_. But the reality - why is everything so much harder to grasp in reality and tinted with unwilled contingency?

Max presses his knee more firmly against Daniel’s, gives it a couple of clumsy rubs up and down. Then Daniel’s eyes suddenly catch something over the edge of Max’s headrest - his face falls and he is quick to straighten himself in his seat again, and then the footsteps of the someone approaching them behind Max’s back reach his ears as well. A spell breaks as quickly as it was cast, and Max almost swears it clatters and chinks against the floor as the pieces of it roll across the carpet and cling to the shoe soles of the person greeting them and walking past.

He looks back at Daniel again as soon as the coast is clear and they are once again left by themselves. Daniel sighs and flashes him an oddly fragile smile before fishing his phone from under his left thigh again. 

_sorry about that_

Max doesn’t know what to answer and, on the other hand, what exactly Daniel is apologizing for. Not instantly and not with a myriad alternatives bouncing uncontrollably from one side of his brain to another. He briefly wonders whether he should push it and try to sneak them to the toilet together so they could at least fucking _kiss_ but can’t bring himself to do so for he has got the vague feeling that Daniel is as much taken aback by himself as he is. And as Daniel lifts his hands to crown himself with the headphones again, braiding the metal and plastic and leatherette in the midst of his curls, the one among the myriad alternative answers that screams itself in the loudest volume in Max’s head is _I’m going to miss you so much_ ; and it thrusts a spike through his throat as he taps _no need to be sorry_.

And they fall silent again. Daniel’s eyes are fixed on the window in a quiet, empty way that tells Max he isn’t really looking out of it at all, and Max sinks into longing and into the disappointment yet to ebb away.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my GOD we are officially back to the mayhem of angst and feels! Or well, now that I think of it, the following is certainly going to be the _least_ angsty addition to this shitstorm, hmm.. :D But anyway, it's an addition nevertheless! And rating moves up for the reasons stated in the tags, yes. Mwah.
> 
> I would really really like to apologize for the delay to all of you incredible, lovely pieces of pancake who have taken the time to see this chaos through so far :') I got a bit stuck with this for a while and unraveled a couple of other ideas in the meantime, as you might have noticed. But in case you have happened to like this for some reason and have been dreading it might never be finished: fear not, it says nine chapters and nine you shall have!
> 
> Also thank you for all the incredible feedback I've gotten, here and elsewhere. I am profoundly humbled and can only hope that I can keep living up to that at least to some extent :') ❤️

Time moves. Tension builds. A surge of sparks from every brush of a fingertip, a peak of heat in every restless kiss in every single hiding spot they can find in the garage, voltage yet to find an outlet.

The bitter-tasting silence that followed Monza has been both forgiven and forgotten for a good while already and they have returned to looking at each other with warmth and dancing the waltz of unguided want with each other. And Sochi is bland but reluctantly kind to them. Of course there is nothing worth boisterous celebrations in their total of eighty-three places’ worth of grid penalties and their fifth and sixth places in the race. Their contentment is dulled at best and they are ever painfully hungry for more, _more_. But when they lay side by side on the bed in Daniel’s hotel room and idly play with each other’s fingers in an uneven silence, in a stolen moment and an illusion of a bubble of their own, they share a feeling of strange complacency nevertheless, out of place but all the more welcomed.

“Did you see Valtteri and Lewis there on the podium earlier?” Daniel asks, conversational yet still slightly absent-minded, balancing between the comfort of sinking quietly into his own thoughts and the comfort of Max, Max’s presence, Max’s silence. He looks to his side and Max faces him with steady, questioning eyes.  
“They looked like a pretty fucking grim pair to me”, Daniel continues. Max wrestles himself lazily to his left side to properly face Daniel and leans on his elbow, rests the weight of his thoughts on his hand. Both his gut and his mind instantly swirl at the sight of Daniel half beneath him, laying so close to him like that, and he unavoidably finds he can’t bring himself to think about the turmoils of Lewis and Valtteri anywhere near as much as he is thinking about placing a touch on Daniel’s body and seeing what would follow.

“Yeah, I saw the footage”, he answers nevertheless, hears his own nerves in his voice. He watches as Daniel then follows him and turns to his right side to mimick the way he is posed, and they are mirrors to each other, calm and close. “I wouldn’t want to be in Valtteri’s place, to be honest.”  
“But y' know, I wouldn’t want to be in Lewis’s either”, Daniel says. There is something absorbingly ponderous about him, darkness and depth sketched on his outlines that chains Max and fills his head with the buzz of static. “I mean, I would certainly want to be in Lewis’s shoes with things like the car being so insanely good and all that, but… I wouldn’t want to win races like that. It doesn’t really feel like an earned, honest win if it’s handed to you on a plate, does it? If it was me, I would want to drive for it all the way to the end. Fight for it, elbows out, teeth bared. I dunno, it just… feels all the more rewarding once you come out on top from something like that.”

In a way it feels like an _inherently_ inappropriate and misplaced reaction in the small parts of Max that have remained untouched and mundane; but the ferocity in Daniel, in his words and in his way of thinking, inevitably stirs something in Max, like the racing talk had served as dirty talk instead. He feels both horrified and bewitched when it spreads inside him and reaches the edges of his mind.

“I wouldn’t let you through like that, y’ know”, murmurs Daniel then with a lowered voice and twinkling eyes. He lifts his arm and draws a slow line with the back of his hand from below Max’s ear to the tip of his jaw. “Not like that, no bloody way. Not unless I had, like, lost all four tyres and my bloody car had exploded to scraps _and_ my head had been blown off in the process. Then I could just _maybe_ consider the option if your pace happened to be quicker than mine after that. Which I highly doubt”, he adds with a gentle smile and broad vowels. “You do drive like a fucking grandma, after all.”

Max chuckles lightly - the familiar, soft amusement surfaces first but it gets swiftly followed by a forceful wave of unreserved, fiery admiration. Daniel’s breaths keep crashing against his lips like ocean waves.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t either”, Max says, dizzy all of a sudden. He can’t rip his eyes off Daniel’s, feeling as if he was falling into them. His stomach tightens and his spine itself seems to be shifting with anticipation he can’t place, not yet; but the urge he feels to drift closer, closer still, is pure instinct and he is eager to follow in its steps until its end. “No way in hell.”

He leans forth to kiss Daniel like times before, and Daniel makes a muffled sound into his mouth that for some reason causes Max’s muscles to tense now and his fingers flex on Daniel’s arm, gripping the sleeve of his shirt in an uncontrolled, unthought of movement. _Shit_ , it surely is not like they haven’t shared their fair amount of kisses lately; but Max feels the same explosiveness on their tongues that he saw on Daniel’s lips on their way back from Monza, and it makes his whole body wind with a shiver. 

Max grows more courageous, traces an adventurous hand down along Daniel’s forearm, warm skin and quivering muscles greeting their counterparts with specks of reserve. He stops for an idle moment to feel the prominent bones on Daniel’s elbow, as if trying to give both himself and Daniel the final chance to break free from the touch, the kiss, the rapidly twisting spiral they are pulling each other into. But Daniel slides his hand from Max’s cheek to the back of his neck and all but thrusts his lips and tongue against Max’s, and Max takes that as encouragement to move on and lay his palm on Daniel’s heaving side.  
“Max, shit”, Daniel exhales somewhere into the kiss, husky in a way that _inspires_ Max as well as makes him feel all the more heated. “Please.”  
“Fuck”, gasps Max in response, breathing and tasting the blunt word more than saying it. His grip on Daniel forgets all tentativeness when it moves to the hem of Daniel's shirt and pulls it up, up to meet Daniel's ribs, digits drawing feverish circles on the bronze and velvet of Daniel's skin. Max can vaguely feel Daniel repeatedly clenching and pulling whatever he can grasp of his hair, over and over before restlessly clutching the front of Max's shirt.

“Can I?” Daniel whispers against Max's mouth, eyes fluttering open and close. It is something he undoubtedly feels the need to affirm and Max bites back a witless smile at the thought of how absurdly _ludicrous_ it would be to say _no_ at this stage, as if Daniel's question wasn't a question at all but simply re-stating the obvious.  
“Yes”, he says, shallow, blissfully lacking air. He moves his fingers to the waistband of Daniel's jeans, hesitates there for a flickering moment; and Daniel catches that and lets go of Max’s shirt, grabs his hand instead and steers it downwards himself.

Max can't help a downright wail at what he finds when Daniel adds pressure on his hand and Daniel lets out a loud gasp simultaneously; the denim is damp where Max comes across it and Daniel’s cock presses against his palm hard and wanton. Max's head spins fast, reels and reels. There is jittery fervour in the way he drags the base of his thumb along the curve of the swell under his touch and it mixes with unwanted hesitation, as if it still was something out of his dreams, sheer figments and fantasies. Daniel has to part from the kiss, he tilts his head back and an indescribable sound bordering on a moan gets trapped in his lungs, replaces the air in there.

Daniel is right there, right now, real and raw and giving himself willingly for Max to take and bend, and suddenly Max finds it so hard to believe he almost loses all his abilities to function. He keeps repeating the same automated movements and irrational patterns of thought like in shock for a moment, unconsciously more than knowingly, gaze wide and clouded. _He wants it as well. It's not only me. He has never- Can he really want this? Am I pushing him too far? Again?_

“Max”, chokes Daniel and forces their eyes to meet again. Blue blends with black and it makes Max feel an odd shadow of shame as he snaps out of his bewilderment. “Y’ okay?”  
“Yeah, I just-”, stutters Max, cursing himself, his own eagerness and adolescence, and his unsure hand stops on the fly of Daniel's jeans again. “You want this?”  
“Does this feel like I don't?” asks Daniel with a cunning grin flashing across his mouth, out of breath and hushed. He places his palm over Max's and presses them both decisively back against himself; Max's gasp at the obscene sensation is louder than Daniel's.  
“No, I guess not”, Max murmurs, and encloses Daniel in a frenzied kiss before Daniel manages to reply. He feels Daniel’s arm around his waist again, a strong hand mindlessly circling on the skin of his back and trailing the arch of his spine before moving lower, along his hip, to his front. He thrusts instinctively against Daniel’s palm once it reaches his cock, keeps rolling his hips and breathes out with shameless sharpness.

Words cease. Max only becomes aware of how badly his hands are shaking once he gets over himself enough to try and open Daniel’s trouser button, and he grunts in frustration right on Daniel’s lips after a moment of unsuccessful fumbling. Daniel chuckles weakly at him, connects the dots; he leans slightly backwards and does the work hastily himself before shifting back to kissing Max and palming him, encouraging him to proceed again, willing him to not stop, never.

Max doesn’t have the presence of mind to get embarrassed about the small defeat, not just yet, the only thoughts pounding in his head being about where they are now and where they are going to go. He edges his hand underneath Daniel’s jeans and cups him roughly through his soaked boxers, making Daniel groan and inevitably break the kiss again as he leans into Max and rest his head against his shoulder. Max feels like he can’t breathe anymore simply because of how heavenly and yet surreal it is to have Daniel there exactly like that, wet and aching and desperate: and Daniel clutches Max like he was on the verge of drowning, and the movement of his hand on Max’s erection falters.  
“Fuck-”, Daniel grunts against Max’s neck, tries to pull Max's pants out of the way and grope him and bite him and breathe and do everything at once and fully manages to do nothing but pant. “Do it, Max, please.”

Max takes it in like a mirage in the middle of nothingness and it is still so different from any of his earlier reveries. The persistent trembling of his hands, the feeling of everything sweeping over him rather than him being confident and composed and in control. There comes a brief moment of paralysis before he can bring himself to pull Daniel's boxers just barely out of his way, another one before he _dares_ to lay his fingers on Daniel's cock. He bites his own lip so hard it makes him flinch and sighs _God_ at the feeling of Daniel slick and steel hard against him, at Daniel's groans and gasps that ring in his ears as a song.

It is something Max has imagined and sought his release to time and time again - this exact pinnacle of long confined lust - this exact touch - Daniel like that - just Daniel - yet now he feels ridiculously unprepared, his first strokes being uneven and almost confused. But Daniel growls and whimpers, his breathing lessens to struggling, harsh ripples of air, and Max finds soothing kind of countenance in the reaction.

“Daniel”, he whispers, lapping the name from his own lips, swallowing it and falling backwards into intoxication; injecting _Daniel_ into his system and soaring with a high from it, making himself forget. He can faintly comprehend through the mist of his haze how Daniel tugs his slacks impatiently and then puts a hand on him like simply following an example, equally unskilled and equally desirous. And once it fully gets to him, the feeling of it pierces every edge of Max's being, shakes him, turns him back to front and upside down. _He wants this, he wants._

And there lies the cruel sense of an irreplaceable moment rapidly fleeting, really, in the way Max quickens the pace of his strokes without realizing it himself, in the way Daniel's breaths grow louder and more demanding by second. There is no patience in Max's heat nor Daniel’s, no testing, no asking. The moment runs from them; yet nothing escapes. Max feels with his body the whims of Daniel's like they were his own - how his muscles clench and fight, how he tries to do to Max what Max does to him but frequently lapses and loses his rhythm, how he trembles with steadily culminating arousal and tremors to his own attempts of getting air in and out,

how he suddenly goes tense and then completely rigid, still like a golden sculpture-!

Max's eyes fly ajar and the thought _he's going to come_ shoots into his head with such speed it would make him amused and awkward if he could think of it any further, how that exact conceit makes it sound like it was somehow unexpected. He nearly can't wrap his mind around what is taking place - it is all nothing but physical and concrete to the fullest, firmly in his grasp, and still somehow unreal like a porno. The fantasy-like way Daniel is slick and burning hot in his hold, the way he spills on Max's fingers and on the sheets and on their trousers with uncontrolled jerks, the way he goes wordless and voiceless after having repeated _Max, Max, Max_ again and again so many times the three letters are almost reduced to nothing with a meaning. And Max is so overcome by what he has been able to do to Daniel that he only realizes how close to his own end he has been for a good while already when his own orgasm is suddenly upon him, a moment after Daniel’s. He registers Daniel’s eyes shooting open at the exact instant, the two bright, black depths he catches a glimpse of before his own eyes squeeze shut with a primal reaction to the inevitable overflow.

Jolts follow jolts, waves follow waves. They follow each other and warm quietude comes after all else.

Daniel is quick to take a hold of Max; he wraps a weakened and vibrating arm around him and presses him close, so tightly flush against himself it makes Max feel buried and smothered at first. Max embraces it, focuses on calming his breathing again, on sinking his air through Daniel’s shirt and skin and calling it back to him in the form of Daniel’s slowing exhales. He feels his sides trying to move and his lungs trying to spread like they were reaching out for Daniel, searching for their counterpart in the body next to Max’s. He would be happy to bury himself in the fire Daniel enfolds him in for all eternity, to be suffocated and crushed by him. His eyes are closed and heavy.

“Max”, Daniel whispers and plants a lazy kiss on where the name lands on Max’s skin. “ _Shit_. Uh. You good?”  
“Yeah, good”, answers Max, the words muffled by Daniel’s shoulder. Ghosts of thoughts come and go - nothing stays for long - until he remembers the words _I have never_ again and for some reason feels a strange surge in his abdomen. “How about you? I mean...”

He doesn’t know how to continue from there and falls quiet. What _has_ taken place has in reality been nothing more than two messy, insecure and inexperienced yet all the more eager handjobs. And somehow it still equals taking Daniel completely apart and over every single one of his limits now, making him fall, making him break. But Daniel inexplicably catches his silence and catches its meaning. Max feels him move and forces his eyes open, and they face each other with a calm kind of curiosity. All things are new and still well-known, all things have shifted and still are in the places they have sat them before.  
“Y’ know what I think?” murmurs Daniel and leans to put a sloppy kiss on Max’s lips, then another, and a third on his cheek and the fourth on his mouth again. “We could do this more often. We definitely could. Nine out of ten, this.”

Max lights up with a coy smile, then a breezy laugh that just erupts from him by its own will.  
“Only nine?” he counters boldly and brushes Daniel’s chin with his lips. He _knows_ that Daniel is joking, bound to be, but it still comes in such a place that it manages to slither under Max's skin and itch. "Wow. That’s really bad.”  
“We had too much clothes on, I reckon”, reasons Daniel nonchalantly, now grinning at Max as well and drawing an uneven, discomposed trail of pecks on his cheek and neck. He is still shivering with the strain and the aftermath but the ever shining sun in him casts a light on Max that makes also him melt and unwind again.  
“I don’t know if _you_ have ever noticed, but I’ve studied porn and they never seem to be wearing anything. But no worries, we’ll practice”, he continues and then stops to kiss Max again, deep and thirsty. “We’ll sure as hell practice. Gimme a couple of minutes and I’ll try and figure out the mystery of getting you out of those stupid pants for starters, if you want. Elbows out, teeth bared.”

There exists a part of Max that tries to tell him it is all a loan. Bound to be. All a debt destined to be paid back. There is no way of knowing, no means of safekeeping, and the firmer he coils all of himself around Daniel, the more there is to let slip through. It flares in the anxious way Max grabs Daniel's neck when he kisses him, its voice looms in the back of Max's throat when he says to Daniel _yeah, I like the sound of that_ like in erotica and laughs, weary with the heavenly post-orgasmic bliss. But right now, in this stolen moment and the illusion of a bubble of their own, he forgets it, he silences it with all of Daniel, and Daniel feels like a high there is no coming down from.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (oh jeepers me my word count hit 100 000 with this)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right! The speed with which this chapter appeared surprises even me, but I was lucky enough to be in a bad mood for a couple of days and thus able to finish what I next had in mind for these assholes. And now I just have to get this out of my drafts. A fair archive warning: shit's about to hit the fan. A big shit. A massive fan.

Time moves. Tension builds. But it's different now from the song of silenced desire their bodies hummed to before; it is an ugly cacophony of destruction that composes itself as Daniel gets crushed and bent closer to his breaking point time and time again and Max follows it from a cloud above.

It starts to escalate faster after Japan. Daniel’s car fails him in qualifying in Suzuka and he screams in anger and agony inside his helmet afterwards. Max takes third in Japan. Daniel's car fails him in Austin and he puts his fist through the wall of his driver room afterwards. Max gets second in Austin. Daniel’s car fails him in Mexico City and he tries to hold his tears back in the press pen afterwards.

Max wins Mexico City.

Max could have never imagined getting torn to pieces of both caring and loathing this way and over the course of only one weekend, hurtling from an infuriated low to disoriented euphoria in only a narrow window of hours. Daniel snatches the pole from Max on Saturday with his last lap out of the blue, almost the exact instant Max is began to be celebrated as the youngest pole-sitter in history, as if he had been spitefully underlining the bitterness of the accomplishment ruthlessly fleeing Max yet again. Max goes to shake Daniel’s hand straight after and he is not sure why, not fully. The whole display feels like a scatter-brained, automated reflex rather than a true effort to congratulate anyone on something that seems to him like nothing but an unjust theft through the angry fog that dims his stare. He looks Daniel dead in the eye - he looks straight into the sun without bothering to cover his eyes, it makes specks of false light explode into his vision - and embraces the image of using his fist to smash Daniel's teeth in instead of giving it for him to squeeze with such intensity it makes him frightened later that night, when he involuntarily recollects the disturbing feeling.

He doesn’t tell Daniel.

And then Sunday flips them.

Sunday takes the puzzle they have spent hours and days and weeks carefully completing and smashes it gracelessly right beneath their feet. Max steals the lead straight on the first lap - and his only thought is _yes yes yes_ and he feels like he has simply taken _what is rightfully his_. He doesn’t look back, he trusts Daniel’s fight and perseverance, serves him right to get robbed this time around, let’s see if he can bounce back like Max. _Keep pushing_. 

Ten laps to the end and Max’s gut rips completely open once he gets the message about Daniel having had to retire from the race. 

They have drifted closer to and they have drifted farther from each other. There has been no avoiding either. Yet Max has completely submerged himself in the way they have _blossomed_ after Sochi, their closeness gingerly molding and changing under the touch of their hands and through the words on their tongues. There have been moments of powerlessness especially after Austin, points where Daniel’s frustration has hung betwixt them so thick that Max has felt at times like he was enclosing it in his grasp instead of Daniel himself. But Max is still a racing driver and he knows the queer, ridiculous single-mindedness of racing drivers through and through. Max has understood it all in his own manner, they have shared and handled it one way or another, and it has seemed to tentatively lessen and then evaporate.

Now they suddenly are on two completely different planets rather than simply on different sides of an all-gorging rift. They live different realities, light years and again light years apart, and to Max it feels like the life that has merged them together in the first place - racing and the love for it - is now working harder than ever to tear them open by the junctures once again. And Max realizes that none of it is his fault but-

oh _God_ , he still can’t stop a clench of helpless horror at the thought of the place Daniel must be in inside his head while Max circles the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez in a void, lap after lap, towards his fifth and perhaps loneliest Grand Prix win. His own face is blatantly on display all over the podium stand and it looks foreign to him. 

What was it that Daniel said about Lewis and Valtteri in Sochi? That they looked like a pretty fucking grim pair to him? What only would Daniel say of himself and Max now if he could see them from the outside in the same way, ponders Max dully as he sends Daniel the fourth message he doesn't read. Valtteri and Lewis at least got to look like a pretty fucking grim pair on the podium together instead of _this_ shit. Max hasn't dared to celebrate exceedingly at all and has excused himself by blaming the toll the hot race in high altitude has taken on him. The thought of needing to talk to Daniel has sat uppermost in his brain all afternoon, banging on his skull and shouting on top of everything else.

And with the poorly justified yet all-conquering self-assurance of a race winner, crowned with the rising anxiety and impatience of his own, he can only assume that Daniel must think and need the same.

There exists a part of Max that tries to tell him that it is a hopeless idea, going to check on Daniel. Bound to be. A doomed deed destined to backfire sooner or later. It flares in the way Max bites his lip without knowing it himself as he gets up from the hotel bed, its voice looms in the back of his throat when hisses to himself _shit_ after accidentally dropping the key card from his hesitant hands in the corridor. But he forgets it, silences it with all of himself this time; he is fogged by his own unconditional submersion, he keeps reciting the persistent notion that Daniel must be too lost in his own ache and simply unable to bring himself to express what he truly longs for. Daniel has made the unexpected error of giving Max the key to his room, and Max makes the error of believing that he somehow holds the key to mending him.

And Max still refuses to see that he possesses no key that would open the lock this time when Daniel closes his eyes and whispers _fuck off_ the second Max enters and lays a questioning, compassionate glance on him. Max refuses to see it when he tries to tie his arms around Daniel and Daniel averts him, all but flinching at the touch Max swiftly places on his bicep before Daniel is out of his reach again. Max refuses to see it when he tries to reach Daniel's gaze and fails, he tries to lift a hand to touch Daniel's cheek and coaxe him into a kiss but Daniel escapes and escapes, withdraws farther and farther into himself until Max manages to force him out and push him straight to his edge.

“With all due respect, Max”, Daniel finally starts after a harrowing silence, looking so empty and drained that seeing it almost stings Max as much as his next words, “yours really is the last fucking face I’d want to be looking at right now.”  
“I understand”, Max says and doesn’t.  
“Nah, you don’t. If you understood, you wouldn’t be here and you wouldn’t have sent me four goddamn messages”, Daniel mutters. He holds his head down like an unseen weight had been placed on his neck, bending and breaking it bone by bone and joint by joint. He holds a muteness in his mouth like an unseen hand had coiled around his throat, bending and breaking his words letter by letter and breath after breath. Max finds himself slowly filling with fear again, fear and dread, and suddenly it all reminds him of the end of the summer break. The end of all, like it then felt. Daniel being right there next to him but not letting him near, the armour of anger rapidly building up to shield him, then creaking and collapsing. 

And it takes an agonizingly long time, too long, for Max to realize through his quickly fading post-race bliss-

“But apparently you have just decided by yourself that we need to talk about it, or that you need to give me a consolation prize blowjob or whatever to cheer me up, now that our situation is what it is, whatever it is. But we can’t fix this like that this time around, okay. I just… Just piss off, will ya.”

that a second place and DNF number seven, or a third place and a fourth, are as a combination still on a slightly different level of unbearable than a _win_ and DNF number eight. It’s Daniel’s words so painfully jabbing him already that causes such a lapse in Max’s nerve that he still pushes it, tries to actually get something out of him.

“I’m sorry, okay-”  
“Oh _please_ , don't even start with that bullshit”, cuts Daniel in irritably. He lifts his hand to restlessly comb his fingers through his curls once again, still avoids Max’s eyes and presence and silence, shakes with ire that Max inevitably starts to catch like a disease. “I seriously don't need you here to act like you wouldn’t rather be partying your arse off out there right now, with the team and some random-ass DJ, instead of watching me being in fucking pieces and playing some kind of a martyr with your oh so _noble_ pity. You're a race winner, congrats - that's probably what you only came to hear, wasn't it, me swallowing what's left of my pride and praising you while I'm neck deep in the shit myself. There, you got it. Now why don't you go and do what race winners do before something happens and you forget what it's like to get results you can genuinely be happy about.”

Daniel could as well have punched him, taken his breath with a blow to the stomach. Max's mouth falls open by itself, as if the pent up remains of yesterday's suppressed fury had suddenly clasped him and tried to make him vomit in their harsh search of a way out.  
“Okay, I know you're disappointed, but-”

“Disappointed?” jeers Daniel incredulously, now on the verge of yelling because it's so much easier to stand there than on the verge of crying. Max feels sick and wants to be able to vanish into thin air. “ _Disappointed_ doesn't cover any of what's going on right now, you can fucking trust me. I can't sleep properly at nights, and I'm in a position now where I'm honestly not sure if there's any point in me going to Brazil or Abu Dhabi anymore, and you being where you are-

but okay, y’ know what - whatever. I'm tired of this already and I don't even know why I'm still talking to you”, huffs Daniel all of a sudden in the middle of his unrestrained rant and looks Max dead in the eye. Max keeps reminiscing Spa but a different moment. Saturday evening, the wildfire he couldn't endure to look at yet couldn't tear his eyes off either. It is there before him now, black and blazing, ready to swallow him whole. Did it ever even fully wane, really?

“I'm leaving the team soon enough and I’ll probably be better off next year in any case if Nico doesn’t decide to completely fuck my game up by suddenly declaring he wants to fuck me, or whatever.”

That's when it strikes Max with its full force what is happening in Daniel’s ramshackle reality. All air is violently pressed out of his lungs by the empty feeling of cold indisputably replacing it, as if Daniel had thrust a spear of ice right through him.  
“You’re _blaming_ me”, he says slowly, numb and unaware of his own limbs and senses. “I honestly can’t believe this. You can’t possibly be blaming me for what’s happening with your car, it’s not like I have done something-”  
“Well, it's still exactly what I'm doing now and I can't help it”, spits Daniel with an off kind of feverish gleam in his eyes. “And it’s not like I’m proud of it. But my racing is a fucking mess and my car’s bullshit and everything’s changing in a few months’ time again and this chaos, whatever this thing is that we’re trying to do with each other - it’s not fucking helping anything at all. Except perhaps you, it would seem. Dunno, maybe you'll do the same to Pierre next year just to get the better of him.”

Max grows frail and frozen, his spit turns sour in a way that doesn’t fall far from the taste of bile again. He stares somewhere in the vague direction of Daniel's neck and face but tries desperately to avoid his eyes, the scorch of them more than he can withstand. So they are back to this after everything that has taken place in and after Spa. They have _fucking_ tripped and fallen back into this cursed circle again, scare and enmity and cowardly hiding behind them instead of properly looking at each other.

“That’s really nice”, he snaps - he is so enraged now he finds it hard to speak but outs whatever comes to mind nevertheless, without a filter, every word feeling like a bullet in his mouth. He knows the drill - ready, aim, fire. “You honestly can't be thinking that. Seriously, you could as well be proud of what you're doing, it wouldn’t make it any worse.”  
“I just really don’t know what to do about you right now, okay”, hisses Daniel back. And Max could almost, _almost_ be capable of feeling endlessly sorry about the crippling hopelessness he sees in front of him if it wasn’t for it taking him systematically apart in every way as well. Bone by bone, joint by joint. “And this definitely isn't the right fucking moment to think it through, so if you have nothing else to talk about than yourself then would you _please_ just kindly fuck off.”  
“You brought it up yourself, and you sure have known what to do about me ever since Monza and Sochi”, Max argues, letting himself sink into the waves crashing over him without a fight. His reasons for even trying to fight anything but Daniel seem to be growing thin again, after all. It is close to something physical rather than emotional, a primal and bodily defense mechanism. Daniel hurts him, he hurts Daniel, there’s a balance of annihilation. Ready, aim, fire.  
“Yeah, until now it has not been a problem to use me as a way to- to perhaps relax a bit and get rid of some frustration, right? Ever since it so conveniently became clear that you could.”

Daniel looks as if Max had slapped him on the face with his full strength placed on an open palm; and Max, despite being absolutely livid, startles at the effect mere words of mouth can have when they are so much more than that.  
“You’re joking”, Daniel blurts - clearly unable to come up with anything else at this point, yet across Max still flashes a wave of pure red wrath.  
“No, you are”, Max retorts crudely. Ready, aim, fire. “Blaming me for your bad luck and treating me like I was some- some entertainment to use when you’re doing okay and then just absolutely shit on when you’re feeling bad. It feels-”  
“ _Fuck you_!”  
“-really great, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if you hit me next like you hit the wall in Austin. Go ahead, try it.”  
“Fuck you, Max. Screw you and your shitfuck biased team, because it obviously is all yours now already”, Daniel chokes through his teeth and gestures blindly towards the door, visibly on the brink of tears but helpless to reach out. And in that he is oddly reflecting obstinance that Max recognizes as his own. Max bears witness to Daniel's downfall and sees flickerings of himself.  
“Piss off, alright, before I actually decide to hit you. I can't do this shit and I don't want to take you to where I am now because it’s pretty fucking dark in here. Go to hell or wherever you want, I don't care. Fuck off.”

Max is almost tempted to stay even further just because Daniel is telling him to leave, petulant and hateful. But he does what feels like unconditional caving; he goes, slams the door shut behind him and tries to bite back bitter tears and bile. The first overpowers him already in the corridor and the latter follows suit once he has barely gotten back to his own room and managed to bend over the bathroom sink.

And then Max lies awake. He listens to the pounding of the silence and the shrill rush of blood in his veins, he counts seconds and the off-tempo beats of his heart. Daniel sends him _I’m sorry_ when the night is at its longest and darkest. Max makes sure that the message, and the three similar ones that follow later on, stay not marked read despite Max seeing the words in the notifications. He is a racing driver, yes, and he knows the queer, ridiculous single-mindedness of racing drivers through and through. But right now, as he keeps staring at the white ceiling and into the depths of his grey soul with eyes that see nothing, he wishes that he didn’t.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hdkdjdjjd. Okay, so. Uh. The time before last I apologized for the delay and now I have to apologize for the amount of heartache I managed to cause to some of you magnificent pieces of waffle (with both ice cream and whipped cream) with chapter 7. Yikes, I AM SO INCREDIBLY SORRY :S :S
> 
> Anyway, time for the next installment of this maelstrom of angst and feels! Yay! Yay? There's going to be a lot of introspection in this one but then again, where do all of the feels come from if not within, hmm. I'd like to give thanks (and one more apology as well hnnngh) to lasorcas for coming up with the characteristic of arrogance in her feedback and nudging me in a good direction with it :) And one more thing, but in case anyone's interested: Daniel not being able to sleep properly is not only an invention of my artsy-ass imagination but in fact something I picked up from [this article](https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/ricciardo-losing-sleep-red-bull-heartbroken/4311983/) where he talks about the sleeping difficulties and the effects of them himself. Content warning for a sad, tired Daniel ;_;
> 
> And speaking of feedback: once again, heaps of thanks to you all for all the feedback this piece has gotten. Every bit of it is appreciated more than words can describe, it keeps me going, and I can only say in return that I adore and cherish you all :') ❤️
> 
> I still hope you enjoy this, or at least endure it! One more to go after this! Oh jeepers.

Max spends the night dreaming ghosts of dreams and feeling ghosts of feelings again; and again they are all about Daniel, from the first one to the last.

The worst part of it all is that Max can’t stop himself from instantly growing insecure, and he finds himself suddenly vacillating on the edges of anger and self-blame and sleep and awake. _He has a point, the timelines match_ , he reasons at one pinpoint of sleeplessness with a certain amount of hopeless unavoidability and traces his thoughts along the path leading from the beginning of the autumn to the winter that is rapidly closing in on them. _Daniel announces his move_ \- I lose my nerve and fuck everything up - _Daniel’s season breaks apart_. No, come on- I honestly can’t blame myself for what is happening with his car. _If he can’t keep himself together, it’s obviously not my fault_. He said he can’t sleep properly at nights. _He can’t sleep, he can’t sleep_. Oh my god, it’s my fault he can’t sleep. _I did this to him_. No, I didn’t do anything, it’s the car. _Fuck him_. I hate him. _I’m sorry, Daniel_.

Ghosts and edges of dreams and feelings, ghosts and edges of sleep and awake. Edges of hate and -

hate and -

All feels like the addictive oblivion of a nightly vision even when Max has already floated closer to his consciousness from his subconsciousness again, having swayed somewhere between the two for some time. He seems to be dreaming of Daniel entering his room with the key he gave him what feels like an eternity ago, before they shattered themselves and each other once more and the locks of their minds were replaced. The whole room is a dim illusion in the early, pale morning light gently wafting inside through the small but persistent openings between the curtains, still calm and grey. And Daniel appears to him like a mirage in the heart of a mirage, the twilight and the shadows amidst the morning glow revolving around him.

Max frowns in his overwhelmed quiescence, feels the knot in his chest like it was real, too much so. Daniel closes the door sluggishly and it faintly clicks shut. Max follows as Daniel slowly closes their distance, walks across the laminates and across the light years between them with his head bowed down and only socks on his feet to not make a sound, to not stir Max's lull. _Come here, Daniel_ , Max thinks through the thick fog of his hallucination-like slumber - he tries to voice it but his lips won't move and his tongue is led, and he desperately wills Daniel to be able to read his thoughts instead.

_Have you gotten sleep at all?_

And even in his blur Max feels the burn of tears somewhere behind his eyes when Daniel sits on the edge of the other side of the bed. Max has his back turned to Daniel, his body yet too heavy for turning around and his muscles bound in somnolence, but he can feel the bed slightly dipping with the weight, like Daniel's sheer warmth had sent rings of mellow shock waves crawling towards Max, vibrating through his body and across the space of the room until crashing into the walls. Max frowns again, tries to bat the burn away from his eyes but isn’t sure if his eyelids obey. He tries to move his arm to lever himself to his back but isn’t sure if it yields to his commands, he tries to make himself wake up but isn’t certain if he is awake already or if it’s just a trick of his mind, a hex of his heart.

Then Daniel’s warmth presses against his back and melts into it, Daniel’s arm curls around his waist, Daniel’s stubble brushes his shoulder through the thin fabric of his t-shirt when he places a small kiss on it. And suddenly Max feels like someone had grabbed his hand and pulled him above from an endless vortex of clouds and mist. He _is_ awake. The knot in his chest _is_ real, too much so, and the sting behind his eyes refuses to cease.  
“Daniel, what-” he mumbles first, and he wants to ask _what are you doing_ and _why are you here_ and everything at once, but his mouth is still reluctant to move and his head reluctant to comprehend.  
“‘S okay”, Daniel whispers back. Max feels his breath hovering across the skin of his neck. Exhale, inhale. Exhale, inhale. “You don’t have to say anything, just… be, if you can.”

Max initially finds himself being surprisingly divided between affection and animosity. The mere thought of looking Daniel in the eye is distressing, more than he can coil his head around; and he is unable to decide which one he dreads more, another explosion that might spark when their eyes touched or simply the sight of Daniel itself, the sundown in the place of the bright summertime glow and scorch. The anger has burnt Max down and left him feeling weary and hollow, the ashes of it still try to stir in his extremities every now and then.

And then they vanish little by little with every tide of thawing and worry scattering them, taking them farther and farther from the heart of him. _But I want to say anything_ , he thinks with drowsy simplicity.

“Let me turn”, he murmurs and briefly grabs Daniel’s wrist to enhance his point.

Daniel lifts his arm barely enough to allow Max to roll to his other side. Max stretches to light the small bedside lamp, it casts a coy and forgiving shimmer; and then he shifts, slow and clumsy, to face Daniel. It wrenches him beyond tolerance, the version of Daniel he then sees, the empty wreck, small and worn. Daniel looks so fragile with his reddened, swollen eyes, with the dried up remains of smudged tear streaks on his cheeks, and there’s a foreign pallor to him that turns the hue of his tanned skin to something sick and sickening. Max is not sure whether it comes from the light outside of him or the dark within- oh God, it’s too much, too much,

 _it’s my fault, I did this to him_.

“I'm sorry, Max”, Daniel says and the eyes that have wandered across Max's face without a compass point fix on Max's now. “I really fucked up.”  
Max swallows and shakes his head - or tries to, but simply ends up rubbing it against the pillow.  
“No, you were right. At least a part of it is my fault”, he answers, filling with his self-blame, indulging in it now. He wishes he could drag his gaze off Daniel’s and hates that simultaneously, his own awkward cowardliness. “I’m sorry. I think I fucked up a long time ago already and I ruined the rest of your season with a selfish breakdown and now… I shouldn't have- harassed you like that earlier.”  
“Harassed me”, Daniel repeats and gives the word he singles out from Max's English a tired smile. He glances down at Max's chest, back up, wandering off and back on the trail he roams like times before.  
“No, _you_ were right”, he resists meekly. “I can't and I don't blame you for anything that's happened with the bloody car, okay. I can't blame myself for that either, of course, I reckon you can’t really blame anyone for this sort of stuff. But I'm not actually putting any blame on you for anything, you have to know that, and I’m so sorry it slipped my big dumb mouth in the first place. I was just in such a horrible state when you came and you… sort of reminded me of what it has been at best, y' know.”

Max remembers last year in an unwanted flash. Spring. Azerbaijan. Not wanting to see or hear from Daniel for hours after the race. The lowest moments of dwelling in unwarranted hostility and the steely, nearly delusional conviction that it must have all been Daniel's fault in some way, every way, because he won. Max understands - and how he sometimes grieves it, the mercilessness with which driving still transcends all, how what happens to one vibrates and resounds in the other and now all the more violently. But if anything, he understands Daniel without question, the whims and vices that are like his own. He nods again, tries to form a sentence in his head, can't, not quite.

“So what I did after throwing a fucking tantrum at you”, Daniel continues, his throat dry and words trying to cling to it on their way out, “was that I had a good old proper cry over how bloody miserable everything is, and then I took a proper look at myself in the mirror and I looked hideous but also did some goddamn thinking.”  
He pauses to rake his fingers lightly through Max’s hair, careful, as if fearing he has made Max as frayed and fragile as he is himself by slamming him to the ground with the powers of his voice and his fury only. “D’ you want to know or d’ you want to ignore my stupid ass and get more sleep while you can?”  
“I think you're the one that should get the sleep”, answers Max and returns the tired, hesitant smile. He kisses the base of Daniel's palm as it passes his lips and stops on his jaw for a moment. “Have you gotten sleep at all?”  
“Some”, utters Daniel quietly and there is a pained glint in it that tells Max that _some_ is not much. “But I didn't want to fly anywhere from here with this crap between us. Like, uh, we did after Spa and Monza. So I'm going to talk anyway, and you can either sleep or listen, your choice.”

Max reaches to touch Daniel's cheek, wipes the stained corner of his eye with his thumb as an irrational reflex. He doesn't say another word, he doesn't have to. 

“Racing’s my life”, says Daniel instead, sounding dreamy. His gaze keeps briefly wandering to the wall opposite him and behind Max's back, then to the small slither of white sheets between their bodies, then back to Max, every time back to Max. “It sounds like meaningless chatter we repeat in every interview like fucking robots but it’s what I do and what I want to do and what _usually_ makes me happy, and I’m sure you know the feeling as well.”  
“Yep, I definitely know”, Max echoes. It briefly crosses him whether anyone else would ever completely know, someone from outside of their obsessed, twisted little world; and it makes him feel an ache he still can’t give a name to.  
“Even now, when the season’s almost over and we’re all dead tired of pretty much everything and looking forward to the holidays and not even thinking about racing, at all… it’s what I love doing, more than anything.”  
“Yeah. I feel exactly the same”, Max complies, in both congeniality and encouragement. It feels like an exsanguination of Daniel all anew, a ritual of purification, done through words of mouth.

“And it’s… kind of heartbreaking, y’ know, when something that’s made you so happy just suddenly ceases to do that”, Daniel stammers, growing more and more lost for a heading by the minute. “It’s been like that for so many weekends this year already and I keep trying to handle it and let go of it and come into every race weekend all fresh and new and whatever, but… you can never get truly and fully rid of these kind of things, right, and it all keeps piling up until it just blows up one way or another.”  
“I know, I’m sorry”, repeats Max, rendered so powerless and misplaced it nearly annoys him just in itself.  
“And what I’ve been trying to get to with all this talk is that- I called it a chaos, this thing between us, whatever it is”, Daniel reminisces, searching for affirmation from Max and finding it in the small, uncertain upward curve Max’s lip draws. “I mean, it might feel chaotic and slightly weird at times and it’s certainly unexpected… But it has actually made me really happy as well, y’ know, in a way I couldn’t have predicted when thought I was alone with this- well, this.”

Max feels such a staggering rush of warmth and relief and hurt and everything at one go that he can’t and doesn’t even want to stop his whole being from igniting with it. Daniel sees it, catches it, reflects it back with a tender smile.

“Yeah, it has”, he assures and gives Max’s cheek an idle stroke with his fingers. “You’ve set me on fire, Max. I have zero regrets about you and this chaos. It’s just that being happy about you and being happy about racing are two different kind of happinesses, if you get what I'm saying. And when you kept sending me stuff and then came to me when I was at my absolute worst, I somehow thought for a moment that…”  
Daniel has to clear his throat and his eyes glimmer and Max is silenced by the multiplication of every single one of the feelings he has had towards Daniel, from loathing to curiosity to lust.  
“I thought that you came there to simply try to replace all the good vibes racing hasn’t been granting me in a while with yourself and your own good vibes, thinking that that should be enough because we are where we are now. And it’s pathetic, I know, but it made me even angrier when I managed to convince myself for a moment that you did that out of some kind of... self-absorption. In addition to pity. I suck so fucking bad.”

It has merged them together and made them the same, racing and the love for it; and it’s going to tear them open by the junctures and rip them apart.

“I wanted to punch you so hard after the qualifying”, Max confesses, smirks and snorts at his own queer, ridiculous single-mindedness that still is the exact same as Daniel’s. “Honestly, I’m not any better than you. I felt like you had stolen _my_ pole position somehow and it was so hard to shake your hand instead of punching you right in your face with mine. I wanted to kick your teeth in. I definitely understand how you’re feeling. I can’t pretend I’m any different or better.”

“We’re total assholes, aren’t we”, says Daniel in response and flashes an exhausted grin. Max bites his lip and processes the committing statement with a weird kind of stoic acceptance.  
"Yeah, exactly."  
“We're taught to have this ludicrous tunnel vision about these things from the first moment we decide to drive some tin can with enough wheels for it to go forward. I mean, you don't get anywhere if you're not selfish enough to bulldoze your way through everything hindering you and to, I dunno, kill everyone who tries to stop you. Well, maybe not _kill_ them, okay, but- get them out of your way, crush your enemies and all that.”  
Daniel keeps his eyes fixed on Max’s, and they are sharper again, dark and deep and strong. Max finds himself relishing it, the sight of Daniel slowly coming back to life before him makes his chest swell with inexplicable, mindless gratification he _still can’t give a name to_. 

“You’re my most dangerous rival, Max”, Daniel mutters, ponderous but increasingly composed. “You’re worse an enemy than anyone else out there. You’re way too close to me both on and off track and you’re the absolute dead last person I should be doing any of this with. I should be crushing you to dust at every opportunity instead of crushing _on_ you at every opportunity. If you know what I mean.”  
Daniel bares his teeth, it’s not quite a grin, not quite a threat. “We shouldn't be doing any of the stuff we're doing, never in a million years, except for being at each other’s throats and regularly wanting to kick each other’s asses. You know that as well as I do, right, and in total we’re just a couple of arrogant, stubborn shits who will rip each other to pieces with this sooner or later.”  
“Yeah, I know all that”, agrees Max yet again, a frail replica of himself. He wavers between odd emptiness and the inexplicable gratification like he wavered between sleep and awake, somehow getting ready for both victory and loss and still feeling paralyzingly unprepared and incomplete. Glimpses of everything that is out of his control swim through his vision and make him feel small and insignificant. "You're right."

“But how come I still want to keep doing all of it?” says Daniel then and looks at and through Max like mesmerized. “You’re just so- _fuck_. I wanted it for so long and I imagined it for so long, y' know. And now that it’s happening, it’s nothing like I thought I wanted and nothing like I imagined. But... like I said, I have zero regrets and my only regret would be not seeing this through.”  


His air softens and his eyes shine with the drops in them when he lays a light palm on Max's chest and says “but honestly - after all the crap I threw at you, I could say I'm sorry for a billion times and I'd still understand if you'd rather choose to stop” with a broken voice.

It's like Daniel had cast aside veils from between them, veil after veil with word after word, dismantling their armours and uncovering them both little by little, baring them to the skin and bone. Max bursts with how much he feels and how much he wishes for and how it all lies there within his reach now, right next to him. He thinks of his own flammable, belligerent temper and of all the underlying, undisclosed traits and corners of Daniel's. The ferocity that at given times borders on madness and fever dreams, the depths of his relentless rage, the dark tones of the desolation he has been forced to succumb to. And that's when it strikes Max with its full force how much Daniel diverts with his shield of sunglasses and smiles; and it strikes him what it must take to expose those underlying corners of his temper to Max, and to Max alone. Max alone. Max with his differences and similarities. He bears witness to Daniel's remorse and sees flickerings of himself once again.  
"I don't regret anything either."

And Max means it to the fullest - he doesn't regret reeling all things between and shoving them in motion, he doesn't regret the impact of a kiss he struck Daniel with the first time they collided, he doesn't regret fighting with Daniel and mending the wounds. Nothing. He stares right into the sun and sundown that is Daniel, he tries to find meanings to the overflows in him but fails; and he averts them and steers away in confusion and calls them all _I want you_ in the whisper he breathes out when he leans in and encloses Daniel in a tight grip and a willing, consuming kiss.  
  



	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. This is it, my fellows. I started this chapter right after On the Sofa last December and now it's time. I honestly can't believe I finished this ~~utter clusterfuck~~ chaos before the beginning of the new season after all. There certainly were moments when I didn't have faith in it. I need a breather :o
> 
> A small speech follows, mwah: firstly, I owe lasorcas thanks (and also apologies hnngh I'm so sorry about everything!) again for, uh, plunging me into a horrible existential crisis for the whole of Monday :') :'D but also providing me with insight and clever remarks that served as an unexpectedly irreplaceable inspiration for this last chapter. I'd also like to thank hbb for both going through (reads: sobbing about) the video and Dan's peculiar (/idiotic) mindset with me right after it, uh, surfaced, and helping me with missing words. And above all: words (missing or found) can't describe how I feel about the comments and general feedback this fic has gotten. Honestly. All of you who have read this have basically sat through a ~29 000 words long, very confused and meandering therapy session with me, and I can never begin to thank you enough for that. I love you all from the bottom of my heart, I hope you have enjoyed/endured this mess, and I hope that you'll enjoy/endure this last mayhem of words as well :'D ❤️

The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix edges closer with unnecessary haste, and along with it the end of the season. And maybe the end of all seasons. Maybe the end of the world like they know it as well.

Max watches on as Daniel does everything in his might to not show how much it matters to him. It feels like his heart itself twists into a broken smile whenever Daniel glances at him from the middle of the swarms of reporters and photographers and well-wishers, from behind his impenetrable mask of sunlight, with bottomless eyes, dim and dark to the core, unreached by the luminescence of the countless lights surrounding the twilit trackside. They keep asking Daniel who or what he will be missing from the team the most once he is gone, waiting for one answer, and one answer only; and he defends himself by throwing at them unpredictabilities like the coffee machine, Simon, the catering folks, anything and everything that comes to his mind right after _Max_ and anything he knows they will accept as another one of his hilarious, inexhaustible jokes.

Max watches on; and he tells himself every time he hears the question, and however it is that Daniel decides to answer it, that he knows that the greatest of truths lie in what Daniel _doesn’t_ say on camera and what he _doesn’t_ do in front of the crowd hungry to bite into him and eat until there would be nothing left but what they want, the innermost truths and blindingly white bones. He knows and he follows as Daniel swerves and steers clear of the siege every time, everything that’s thrown at Daniel recoils from his shield of sunglasses and smiles, and he opens his arms to Daniel when he returns to the haven they are to him now, exhausted and apologetic.

“You know it’s not true, right?” Daniel ensures once their kiss breaks, again - Max kisses him perhaps a little too hard every time, just a tad too possessive, only slightly jealous. It is as if he kept reminding Daniel of something and everything he still can’t quite comprehend or lay out in words, laying it out in wantful actions instead. “I definitely won’t miss the fucking coffee machine more than you, the coffee’s never been that bloody mind-blowing.”  
“It’s okay, I'm not worried about it”, answers Max in an automated attempt to soothe them both. A quiet, longing sigh escapes from his lungs at Daniel caressing him with regretful, reassuring strokes. “But I’m not so sure if I should be worried about Simon, though”, he adds, not being able to resist trying to get just a little bit more, testing, pinching Daniel with a mixture of joking and yearning and the kind of unwarranted envy he is helpless to stop. He tops all with a light chuckle, tries to do what Daniel always does and deflect and hide; but Daniel shakes his head and looks at him with surprisingly serious eyes.

“Don’t”, he warns and lifts his hands to the back of Max’s neck. “Never as much as you”, he says firmly before kissing Max again, almost frantic to shackle him with it now. The quiet ticking the cogs in their clock make as they turn faster and faster plays a merciless melody in their ears.  
“Sorry”, Max murmurs against Daniel’s lips and feels Daniel toying with the hem of his shirt, gently tugging it up and exposing the skin of his sides to a whimsical flow of conditioned air.  
“I’ll miss everything I’ve said I’ll miss, alright”, Daniel whispers against Max’s neck, hands running the length of Max’s spine and drawing a hitched gasp out of him. “I’ll miss Simon and the coffee machine and the third mechanic from the left and whatever. But what I’ll miss the most is exactly the thing I can’t say I’ll miss the most.”

The words stop there and want takes over, they still don't know the right words and try to speak in a soundless language instead. Indescribable despair now mixes with desire in the way they touch, the silent inkling that the time they have given each other is starting to be up slithers in their veins among the recurring rushes of blood. They lie on the bed afterwards, absorbing each other’s warmth, searching for glimpses of forgetfulness. And Max _knows_ that the firmer he coils all of himself around Daniel, the more there is to let slip through, _fuck_ , how could he not remember when it’s thrown back at him time and time again; but how could he not grasp and keep Daniel for as long as he can, for as long as the chances still exist? How could he stop himself from coiling all of himself around Daniel, tighter and tighter, fracturing and snapping yet basking in the bliss of having whatever he can have of him before he has to let it go?

“What ’cha thinkin’?” asks Daniel in an exaggeratedly wide accent even for him and grins a lopsided grin when he reaches to card his digits through Max’s ruffled hair. He inadvertently pulls Max back to existence from his spirals, instantly notices the perplexion tinting his coy smile and anchors to it.  
“Tell me your secrets. If there are any left.”

Max feels like he is being foolish and pathetic with his sudden, resurfacing need for reassurance - they have talked it all through and again and again and yet _again_ and they have shed light on each other during the course of the short, fleeting autumn in ways they couldn’t have pictured in the beginning of their times as teammates, in the beginning of the year, even in the beginning of the summer break. But a faint, unwanted echo of the past fears and insecurities and _what if_ s haunts Max’s edges.  
“I’m just being stupid”, he starts in an excuse for himself right from the beginning. “At least that’s how I think, if I’m honest. But I also think that it doesn’t do any good to not tell you that it can be a bit hard at times to… you know, to not hear you say that you’ll miss me. I guess I know your reasons, of course, but there are- _moments_. Let’s say it like that.”

A calm understanding settles into Daniel’s eyes and he moves the warmth of his hand from Max’s hair to his cheek. There is nothing in his essence that huffs _we’ve been through this already_ in frustration - not a silent, exasperated sigh, not a bite on his lip, not a shake of his head. Max’s body involuntarily shivers and shifts as if it had wept under the weight of everything he feels for Daniel.

“This is going to sound incredibly sappy but I know that you know that I’ll miss you like hell, okay”, Daniel says and his gaze darts back and forth over Max’s face in a search for words and ready-made answers that returns nothing. “That’s never the issue.”  
Max nods and his mouth flinches in a flat half-smile. “I know. Forget it, I’m sorry for bringing it up again.”  
“It’s actually the complete opposite of that”, begins Daniel over Max’s needless regret. He frowns, swallows thickly, and it suddenly starts to dawn to Max why exactly Daniel is and has been the way he is and has been. “It’s all so much it goes to this ridiculous level, y’ know, where I find myself having to pull every trick I know to simply keep myself together somehow.”

Max plants his palm gently on Daniel’s shoulder. Daniel glances down at Max’s chest - it’s a familiar reflex to Max by now and one he has grown fond of, those pensive moments of stillness Daniel takes to collect himself and his words. And Max knows he is staring right into the heart of a rare kind of ugliness and beauty the rest of the world will never know of.  
“It’s not that I don’t want to or need to say it out loud”, elaborates Daniel again, slower now, thoughts earnest and heavy in his head. “You’ve been asked the same questions as well and you have answered like everyone has expected you to answer and no-one’s even blinked, not even you, and it’s perfectly fine.”  
His eyes glisten when he looks back at Max and Max is full of something that is _begging_ him to recognize and speak itself, the same something that has grown in him for the whole autumn and all their times together, the same something that is starting to reach its pinnacle and bleed out of him.  
“But I can’t- I’m so close to completely going to pieces all the time that I just can’t bring myself to do that on top of everything” Daniel whispers with distress. “I’m so overwhelmed by all this that I feel like I have to stick to joking and being a fucking brat every time I get asked something like that because it's the only way I know to get by, it always has been. And without it- I think I would just instantly collapse.”

Max wipes the wet stripe crawling across Daniel’s cheek with his thumb, not drying it as much as simply smudging it.

“And I feel like if I showed anything on camera or in public, anything at all, even the tiniest of bits of it”, Daniel continues and his eyelids keep batting feverishly and Max has his answers to every single one of his questions, voiced and unvoiced, “it would all be straight out in one huge mess, all at once. Not only that I _already_ miss you so fucking much I don’t know what to do with myself, which I guess is kind of ridiculous in itself considering that our garages are still going to be right next to each other next year... But also how much I- I dunno, how much I care and what this all means to me and how confused it makes me feel even though it’s bloody myself who’s changing teams and-”

Daniel’s already faltering voice finally fails him. Max wraps one arm around his shoulder and pulls him closer still, as if trying to melt them into a single entity, and Daniel tries to catch his breath beneath him.

And that’s when Max knows and sees the names of the overflows in him. The something bleeding out is given its true identity, and the weight of everything he feels for Daniel is measured.  
“I think I love you”, he whispers against the curve of Daniel’s ear, tangling his fingers through the ebony of Daniel’s fuzzy curls. It's as if he was plunging headfirst into a void of black, uncharted waters; yet, strangely enough, he is not scared of them any longer.  
“I don't even know if you feel the same way about me and I surely understand if you don't. I don’t know if I should say it at all. But there's no other way of putting it any longer and I can't help it. I love you, Daniel.”

Max feels Daniel’s whole body hitching as the breath he tries to take in jams to place, unable to get past his lips. Daniel turns his head to look at Max and Max faces him without shields and spears and armours and fears; Daniel’s eyes are wide and star-lit and he runs his fingertips along Max’s jawline like he was sketching his features on thin air, like Max was to him a mystery all of a sudden.

“Then there’s two of us”, he murmurs through the remainders of tears and a tentative smile arches his lip. An inexplicable rush of what feels like the whole universe at once crashes through Max, shakes him, makes him dizzy and high.  
“By which I don’t mean that I love me as well- or, I obviously love me heaps, but”, Daniel clarifies, completely unneeded, lost for a heading once again. And then a widening, confused grin creates an opening in the corner of his mouth _because_ , thinks Max while shaking his head and smiling mildly, _it’s just the way he always is and the way he’s always going to be_.

"Here's the deal, a fair warning”, Daniel says and his mouth turns serious for a heartbeat. “I hate your guts so much at times, okay. I can't pretend otherwise, and there are moments when I can't stand your face, or even being on the same fucking planet with you. It's what the job does. But the rest..." 

Daniel puts his palm on Max's jaw and chains them tightly together with the immovable sincerity in the darknesses of his eyes. "For the rest of the time I honestly feel like I wouldn't know what I'd do without you being on the same planet anymore. It's really that bad, how much I need you. I think I crashed and fell for you a long time ago and it feels kinda _weird_ when I say it out loud like this, but I- _fuck_ , I love you so goddamn much it makes it hard for me to breathe when they ask whether I'm going to miss you after all this. Shit, Max, I actually do love you.”

Max simply bows to kiss Daniel as a response and it feels like the first kiss they have ever shared. The taste of the other feels completely new with ripples of their words still ghosting in their mouths, the feeling of the other’s lips and the other’s skin under the touch of a trembling hand is pliant and familiar in a way it hasn’t been before. They part, they kiss again, they part. And they stop still.  
“An excellent time to realize all this, isn't it?” Daniel chuckles weakly and brushes the side of Max's face with his knuckles. “We’ve still got a whole couple of weeks left as teammates, after all. Oh shit. We’re idiots, aren't we.”

Max’s eyes are warm in a reflection of Daniel’s and his smile is diluted by plaintive acceptance.  
“I know”, he agrees once more. A blurry replay of all the times Daniel has voiced what Max hasn’t been able to voice, and vice versa, rewinds itself from the beginning to the end in his head. “But- what was it that you said to me in Mexico? I didn't want to fly anywhere from here with this crap between us, right. And by _crap_ I mean that it doesn’t do any good not to tell you everything. So, yeah. That's how I feel. I hate your guts as well sometimes, of course, but I definitely like you more than I dislike you.”  
“I bloody love you”, Daniel repeats with an awe-tinted cadence, as if he had finally gotten over the initial blow of facing the unexpected fact, and pulls Max in for a soft kiss again. A content sigh drowns somewhere into it, a shared burst of air.

And they stop still.

They part.

They both know.

“There’s not much more we can do about it, is there?” Daniel says, thinks out loud, it’s lackluster like a worded shrug before something he knows is too much out of his powers for him to change, come what may. A shadow flies across the room, sits in the corners of their eyes, makes the light flecks grey and black spots infinite. They know.

“It's going to be exactly like this for as long as we decide to stick with it, isn’t it? It's just like this, no matter how much-”  
Daniel's voice crackles and dims and escapes in the middle of the notion and he has to stop to capture it again. “No matter how much there’s love, y’ know. It doesn't conquer all in the end, not with what we do for a living and not what it takes from us. We meet whenever we can meet and do what we do whenever we can do it, but... that’s about it, I reckon. There can be no huge arrangements of any sort. No strings attached, huh, because we just can't attach any.”

Daniel keeps idly stroking Max's cheek with his fingertips and it subtly underlines the tender melancholy in him and in the truth. “We're always going to be more time-limited and chance-limited than we'd want, aren't we, and we can’t promise or offer each other anything more than what I just described. In ways it's even less than what I already didn't promise you in Monza. It sounds so incredibly sad I feel kinda sorry for us, even though I wouldn't want it to end either.”

In a way it is the swansong of a love. One kind of it, the feeble and shivering. And it's the first notes of another kind, the headstrong and daring. Max nods slowly, processing the harsh reality with the stoic acceptance he has learned to keep with him ever since Mexico, ever since Monza, ever since Daniel first let him in. Somehow the weight of their reality and _what if_ still feels less crushing when they both know it, when they can make halves of it for both of them to carry.  
“But I think that we are something like what you just described already”, he points gently, his smile crestfallen but solid. “We have always been like that, and I also think we would have to be like that even if you didn't leave the team. And of course I know this is going to be even more difficult next year with us in different teams, I'm not completely stupid, but… I know all that, and I'd still like to see this through with you.”  
“It could be easier in a way as well next year, y’ know”, Daniel reasons and casts a shimmer on Max with a dry smirk again. “It could well be that it’s better for us that we’re not in each other’s direct line of fire and you won't necessarily have to suffer my tantrums and other crap I've already thrown at you whenever they occur.”

“Who says I don't want to be in your direct line of fire?” Max asks all of a sudden, and Daniel’s face lights with something Max recognizes as the ache he felt when he first wondered whether anyone else would ever completely understand them, the ache he now knows how to name. “It has made me nothing but better in every way and like I said, your tantrums are not any worse than mine. Again, I'm no different or better. I said I want you and that means I want all of you, or at least as much as I can get, even the tantrums and the crap. I know how to fight back, after all.”  
“You sure as hell know, asshole”, Daniel murmurs and flashes a grin - oh, Max cherishes it beyond all, the specks of sun Daniel lights him with, the specks of sun destined to grow less frequent and more remote come winter and distance. “And that’s one part of it, like you must know already. I really don’t want us to end up… well, we’ve said it dozens of times before, but I don’t want us to end up like Lewis and Nico did. We're egoists and it's sort of asked of us, but I don’t want us to break like that and turn into enemies. What we have here is pretty damn good.”

“I am your enemy already”, Max remarks quietly and slyly returns Daniel's smile. "And you're mine. You are absolutely the worst of them. Nothing is going to stop me from trying to make sure I beat you at every opportunity, and I'm sure it's exactly the same with you. I think that we're going to be at each other throats and regularly wanting to kick each other's asses for as long as we drive against each other, no matter what.”  
“Fuck you, Max, I love you so fucking much”, Daniel says airlessly, hushed and sounding almost aroused by the way they mirror each other in their mindless competitiveness and unbending pride. Beast-like ferocity tastes in the kisses they share now, restless and strained with the weight of their mutual feelings, love and hate and admiration. “I can't stand you when you're like that and I could stand being without you even less. It's like you're everything at once and it drives me insane.”  
“It's the same with you”, Max breathes back and presses his lips wildly on Daniel's again; an old, fogged memory of an impact comes back to him when he whispers _you’re not the only one who is having a hard time with all this, you know_. 

But this time Daniel chuckles lightly back at him when he remembers what Max remembers and returns his touch, this time it is the version of Daniel that stays, and it’s only for moments and glimpses, but it still is more than either of them could have ever asked for; and they are left with an immeasurable amount of nothing at all yet everything they can have.  



End file.
